Maria with her thesis and some of her apple images
Maria Christodoulou successfully defended her PhD viva voce today with examiners Professor Richard Sibly and Dr Stephen Harris (Oxford). Her spritied defence of the use of computer imaging and a wide range of mathematical approaches to automate apple cultivar identification was the culmination of a four year BBSRC Industrial CASE studentship with Sainsbury’s. She demonstrated high levels of success in identification of a range of apple cultivars from the National Apple collection at Brogdale and from those commercially available in UK supermarkets.
Alongside her PhD she has managed to help many other BSc, MSc and PhD students to understand the need to gets statistics right and to make sure that the question being asked is the question being tested with the statistic under use.
Maria helping field class with ID and stats.
She also found Drosophyllum in the wilds of Spain:
Maria photographs Drosophyllum lusitanicum
…and found time to get married to Kalman. Clearly a busy year!
