Doctor Maria Luisa Davila Garcia PhD, FHEA
Senior Lecturer
Summary
I am a Researcher and a Senior Lecturer in Applied Artificial Intelligence. My professional formation has been motivated by the development, integration, and adaptation of smart technologies and AI in the healthcare domain. My areas of expertise are machine learning, medical image analysis, NLP, and multimodal AI.
About
I have contributed to the integration of AI techniques in areas of healthcare and well-being. Since 2019, I have been working in close collaboration with healthcare professionals from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS and the Sheffield Children's Hospital.
I have a growing expertise in the integration of AI solutions for the benefit of two main sectors of the population: Children and Women. I started my research journey with the development of ML techniques for early diagnosis of rare diseases in Children. From 2023, I have been actively working in the integration of AI solutions supporting mental health for women from minority groups. In 2025, I have been working with the York Abdominal Wall Unit on the integration of NLP techniques to improve QoL in patients.
I support and recognise the value of multidisciplinary work in collaboration with academia and the private sector, embracing the importance of patients, families, and final users contributing to the design of AI-based solutions.
Teaching
School of Computing and Digital Technologies
College of Business, Technology and Engineering
Artificial Intelligence
MSc Artificial Intelligence
Applied AI
AI Research and Development Projects
Advanced Robotics and AI
Smart and Interactive Healthcare Technologies
Research
- Industry and Innovation Research Institute
My research focus is the development, integration, and adaptation of smart technologies and AI in Healthcare and wellbeing.
- Supervisor for “Undergraduate Internship Programme” funded by NIHR, working on the development of the “Perinatal mental health resources”
- Project DigiCP, digital tools to promote positive awareness about Perinatal Mental Health Care Pathways.
- Feasibility Study: Using NLP and Synthetic Patient Narratives to Assess Quality of Life in Abdominal Wall Hernia
Publications
Journal articles
Abbas, A., Davila Garcia, M.L., & Chintapatla, S. (2025). Enhancing the Utility of Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) Assessment Tools in Abdominal Wall Hernia (AWH) Surgery Through Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Framework Proposal. Journal of Abdominal Wall Surgery, 4, 14952. http://doi.org/10.3389/jaws.2025.14952
Conference papers
Davila Garcia, M.L., Soto, D.A.P., & Mihaylova, L.S. (2018). A Bag of Features Based Approach for Classification of Motile Sperm Cells. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData). http://doi.org/10.1109/ithings-greencom-cpscom-smartdata.2017.21
Van Raemdonck, L.E.M., Ata-ur-rehman, , Davila-garcia, M.L., Mihaylova, L., Harrison, R.F., & Pacey, A. (2015). An algorithm for Morphological classification of motile human sperm. 2015 Sensor Data Fusion: Trends, Solutions, Applications (SDF), 1-6. http://doi.org/10.1109/sdf.2015.7347714
Internet Publications
Davila Garcia, M.L., Lanfranchi, V., Offiah, A., Villa-Uriol, M.-.C., & Yang, P. (2021). Image Analysis and Machine Learning for Diagnosis of Skeletal Dysplasias. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350654682_Image_Analysis_and_Machine_Learning_for_Diagnosis_of_Skeletal_Dysplasias
Posters
Roast, C., Davila Garcia, M.L., Soltani, H., & Danickova, E. (2023). DigiCP- Addressing Health Inequalities through the Digitalization of Perinatal Mental Health Care Pathways. Presented at: Healthcare Analytics and Artificial Intelligence 2023, Department of Computing, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, 2023
Other publications
Davila Garcia, M.L., Villa-Uriol, M.-.C., Civaregna, F., Lanfranchi, V., & Haq, I. (2019). "Early detection of Papilloedema and Diabetic Retinopathy". INSIGNEO: https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/insigneo/news/insigneo-showcase-2019