Dr Aida Santaolalla

Aida Santaolalla is a senior data scientist in the Translational Oncology and Urology Research (TOUR) Team in the School of Cancer & Pharmaceutical Sciences at King's. She became a senior data scientist (Senior Research Fellow) in Cancer Epidemiology in September 2017. She joined the group in November 2011 from Barcelona Supercomputer Center to work creating infrastructure to support the King's Health Partners PCa Biobank, the collection GSTT patients information including demographics, clinical, pathological and imaging data and to closely collaborate with the clinicians and scientist within the King’s Health Partners' Uro-Oncology Programme. In Barcelona, her master’s thesis was focused on the development of infrastructure for a biomedical project called IMIDKit, a Genome Wide Association Study of Immune Mediated Diseases. In that project she developed a web-interface and an epidemiological database to collect the clinical data as part of her master’s on Bioinformatics for Health Sciences from University Pompeu Fabra (UPF) Barcelona. While in King’s She completed her PhD on ‘Data reduction methods to study cancer susceptibility’ on February 2018.

Aida continues to work in health informatics developing infrastructure for different research projects in prostate cancer such as the recently funded MRC Stratified Medicine Consortium Re-IMAGINE, which aims to investigate the use of MRI in the diagnosis of localised prostate cancer and performing statistical analysis. Also provides statistical advice such as in the Movember Foundation's GAP3 cohort project that focus on prostate patients under active surveillance treatment where she a member of the GAP3 executive stats team. Alongside, Aida collaborate with different clinical research groups providing support in terms of study design, statistical advice and statistical analysis. In addition, Aida has an interest in molecular epidemiology, immunology and the exposome approach, more specifically exploring latent molecular characteristics in the population that might increase their cancer risk and mortality and the link to the external environmental factors. Hence, she works closely with the Swedish team in the Institute of Environmental Medicine, Karolinska Institute using the Apolipoprotein Mortality Risk Study (AMORIS). She was recently awarded with the KCL Global Research Grant Award 2019 and HH Wingate Foundation travel Grant 2019.