Anita Rau

Hi! I am a Postdoc at MARVL, the Medical AI and Computer Vision Lab at Stanford University, where I am advised by Serena Yeung-Levy.

My research is at the intersection of AI and computer vision, with a focus on automating the spatial and semantic understanding of video. I am particularly interested in highly dynamic, high-stakes environments—such as surgery—that involve fine-grained actions, complex visual scenes, and decision processes that are difficult to capture exhaustively in standard datasets. By integrating multi-modal data, I aim to develop generalizable models that can interpret and act on real-world scenarios, with the goal of supporting decision-making, enhancing training, and improving safety in critical applications.

Before joining MARVL, I earned my PhD from University College London, where I was part of the Surgical Robot Vision Group advised by Dan Stoyanov. During my PhD, I also interned at Niantic Research in London. Prior to that, I received an MSc in Computational Statistics and Machine Learning from UCL and a BSc in Mathematics and Economics from the University of Mannheim.