Ana Namburete is Associate Professor of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Oxford, and Rokos Tutorial Fellow at Pembroke College. She founded and leads the Oxford Machine Learning in NeuroImaging (OMNI) Lab, which develops AI tools for quantitative assessment of the developing brain from ultrasound.
The lab’s work centres on extracting biomarkers of fetal neurodevelopmental maturation that lie beyond the reach of conventional clinical assessment but are measurably predictive of long-term outcomes. Ultrasound is central to the lab’s approach because it is safe, portable, and deployable in the low-resource settings where maternal and fetal care is most needed. A landmark paper in Nature (2023) established the first normative spatiotemporal atlas of fetal brain maturation, linking regional developmental trajectories to neurodevelopmental outcomes at two years of age. Subsequent work published in The Lancet Obstetrics, Gynaecology & Women’s Health applied these normative trajectories to characterise the consequences of impaired fetal brain growth, opening new avenues for early clinical intervention. The lab’s open-source OMNI Ultrasound Toolkit, which automates fetal brain segmentation and volumetric analysis from 3D ultrasound, is in active use at research centres worldwide.
The lab’s research is supported by an ERC Starting Grant (WOMB2COT, 2026–2031), the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, EPSRC, and the Academy of Medical Sciences, representing more than £7.5M in total funding. Ana completed her DPhil in Engineering Science at Oxford under Professor Alison Noble OBE FRS and held a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship from 2016 to 2022. She is committed to public engagement: in 2023 she was a Featured Scientist in the BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, one of the UK’s most celebrated science communication programmes.
Career
2023–Present Associate Professor of Health Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
2021–Present Rokos Tutorial Fellow in Computer Science, Pembroke College, University of Oxford
2021–2023 Research Lecturer, Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford
2016–2022 Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow, University of Oxford
2015–2021 Stipendiary Junior Research Fellow, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford
2015–2016 Postdoctoral Researcher, Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford
Education
2016 DPhil in Engineering Science, University of Oxford (Supervisor: Prof. Alison Noble OBE FRS)
2011 BASc (Hons) in Biomedical Engineering, Simon Fraser University, Canada (First-Class Honours with Distinction)
Selected Distinctions
2026 European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (WOMB2COT)
2023 Featured Scientist, BBC Royal Institution Christmas Lectures
2021 Academy of Medical Sciences Springboard Award
2018 Best Paper Award, MICCAI PIPPI Workshop
2017 Best Paper Award, MICCAI FIFI Workshop
2016 Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellowship
2015 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Grand Challenge Explorations Grant
2011 Commonwealth Scholarship for Doctoral Studies
2011 APEGBC Achievement Award in Biomedical Engineering