Biography
Marirena Bafaloukou is a PhD researcher in the Sandor Lab at the UK Dementia Research Institute, Imperial College London, working at the intersection of machine learning and biomedical data science, with a focus on developing representational AI systems that integrate multimodal biological and clinical data for early Parkinson's disease detection and stratification.
Marirena holds a degree in Biology from the University of Athens in Greece, where she completed an internship in a Parkinson's lab investigating post-translational modifications of alpha-synuclein using site-directed mutagenesis, and later focused her one year-long project on exosome-mediated transmission of alpha-synuclein fibrils in astrocytes and microglia using cell culturing, immunocytochemistry, and confocal microscopy.
She also holds an MSc in Translational Neuroscience from Imperial College London, where she developed a machine learning algorithm that detects agitation in dementia patients living at home using passively collected monitoring data. She additionally developed an interactive framework for simulating in silico environmental interventions, helping clinicians design interventional studies targeting agitation. She published this work as a first-author paper in eClinicalMedicine, The Lancet Discovery Science.
Research interest
Her research focuses on early detection and stratification of Parkinson's disease using multimodal data, integrating Olink plasma proteomics, longitudinal electronic health records, and wearable-derived biomarkers. She implements machine learning models and statistical approaches but also develops interpretable ML frameworks including graph neural networks and transformer-based models.