Valentina Salvatelli

Valentina Salvatelli is a Research Lead in the AI & Robotics team at the Ellison Institute of Technology in Oxford. Her current research focuses on AI for health and biology, including multimodal patient models, representation learning and vision reasoning for biomedical and cell imaging, and AI-driven approaches to accelerate scientific discovery.

Before joining EIT, she was a Principal Researcher in the Biomedical Imaging Team at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK, where she led research on AI for pathology and radiology, with a focus on large-scale vision representation learning, multimodal modelling, and clinical evaluation. Her work contributed to AI systems for medical image interpretation, report generation, and patient screening, including models that progressed to clinical trials. Earlier, as AI Lead at IQVIA, she led research and development of real-world AI systems for rare disease diagnosis based on electronic health records, in partnership with pharma and healthcare providers.

Valentina began her research career in astrophysics, using astronomical data to study fundamental physics in major NASA and ESA collaborations before moving into AI for health over a decade ago. More recently she has also been a faculty mentor at the Frontier Development Lab, leading and mentoring projects at the interface of AI, remote sensing, space missions, and heliophysics.

She holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics and a B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from La Sapienza University of Rome.