I understand that you toured a lot, instead of growing up in one place. Tell us about this experience. It was mainly all around Greece. During my primary and secondary school I had to move almost every year. Northern Greece, Cyprus, I made lots of friends everywhere. I think that's why, once I found a suitable place like UCL, I wanted to stay. Isn't it difficult to leave all the friends every year, kind of forever? Yes, yes, it was. And back then we were writing letters to each other. It was very sweet because I still have them. And with some of them we can still meet. I bumped into some of them in London. The world is a small place after all. Tell us something we don't know about UCL. I can't speak about UCL as a whole: I was very lucky to be in a group which was always within a center that now became an institute. We were CMIC, Center for Medical Image Computing, run by Professor David Hawkes. We were an extended big academic family, which became even bigger, hence the Hawkes Institute named after Professor Hawkes. Let's talk about the future, Laura. Where are you going? I don't know if this is a secret or not, but I'm going to tell you: I applied for my professorship. Now I'm waiting for the results in the summer. I'm hoping bigger and better. You know, it is true that with this position you get more power in terms of getting more grants and being more self-efficient. One of the things that is going really well is a method I developed called Verdict MRI. It is specifically for non-invasive imaging of tumors. The first clinical trial was in prostate. We are now in the third clinical trial, which is a multicenter trial that just started. This is very promising and very high impact! Do you hope that one day it will be used in the clinics? Yes! The method was never patented. We followed the NHS guideline route to get it out there as soon as possible. And I'm working with UCLH, which is the hospital associated with UCL. It's going really well! Yeah, we're hoping to get it out in the clinical routine soon. It sounds very exciting! It is very exciting. It's a method that will potentially reduce significantly the amount of unnecessary biopsies that can cause a lot of side effects. They're painful. And you get the results. People worry for that. They wait one month to get the result. Exactly! The histopathology results! We won't have to wait for that. We're hoping to get this virtual biopsy just with the MRI, without Women in Computer Vision 18 DAILY WACV Sunday
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