MSc Bioinformatics University of Birmingham

08/08/2017

Professor Gkoutos has worked and contributed on many projects, below is one of the publications

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26214591

08/08/2017

Introducing our module leader for Data Analytics, Professor Georgios V. Gkoutos PhD, DIC

Role: Professor in Clinical Bioinformatics

George Gkoutos is a Professor of Clinical Bioinformatics with interests in the general areas of clinical and biomedical informatics, computational biology, and integrative and translational research aiming at the discovery of molecular origins of human disease and the development of novel diagnostic and intervention strategies.

18/07/2017

10/07/2017

Prof Ben Brown is also the founding member of the EcoFab Project
http://eco-fab.org/what-is-ecofab/

10/07/2017

To read more about Prof Browns work on ENCODE: Encyclopedia of DNA Elements please visit the link below
https://www.encodeproject.org/

The ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) Consortium is an international collaboration of research groups funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). The goal of ENCODE is to build a comprehensive parts list of functional elements in the human genome, including elements that act…

05/07/2017

Professor James Bentley Brown PhD will be our module lead for Computational Biology.

About:
Prof Brown is the inaugural Chair of Environmental Bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham, UK, and the Department Head for Molecular Ecosystem Dynamics in the Environmental Genomics and Systems Biology Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, USA. He leads integrative analysis for the Consortium for Environmental Omics and Toxicology (CEOT), and is involved in the Microbes to Biomes Initiative, leading analysis for a project aimed at understanding host-microbiome interactions in adaption to environmental challenges. He is a founding member of the EcoFAB project, which aims to re-invent ecosystems biology through the innovation of reproducible bench-top ecologies. He has participated in the ENCODE Project since the Pilot, where his lab develops statistical and machine learning technologies to facilitate foundational genomic science. His lab studies how information encoded in genomes gives rise to complex systems at scales from cells to populations and ecosystems. This work is funded by the National Institutes of Health (USA), the Department of Energy (USA), and the National Environmental Research Council (UK).

Interesting Fact:
Prof Brown spends about half the year in the UK, with the other half in the US, at his lab in Berkeley, CA.

28/06/2017

Dr Christopher Yau has co-authored the research findings, which show Cancer tumours manipulate a natural cell process to promote their survival suggesting that controlling this mechanism could stop progression of the disease, according to new research by the Universities of Birmingham and Oxford.

To read more about these finding http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/news/latest/2017/06/cancer-hijacks-natural-cell-process.aspx

27/06/2017

Introducing our module leader for Taught Essential of Mathematics and Statistics and Biology:

Name: Dr Christopher Yau

Role: Reader in Cancer Computational Biology

About:

Christopher is a Reader in Computational Biology based in the Centre for Computational Biology at the University of Birmingham.

He studies how cancer evolves and becomes resistant to treatment using computer-based machine learning approaches to model the genetic make-up of cancer cells with data acquired from modern sequencing technologies. His goal is to develop clinical decision support making algorithms that can help us to deliver the right treatment to the right patients at the right time. Christopher also hopes to identify genetic abnormalities that might be targeted by novel treatment agents. He has worked with researchers and clinicians at the Ovarian Cancer Laboratory at the University of Oxford and the Francis Crick Institute for Medical Research. He also co-leads the Machine Learning effort of the UK 100,000 Genomes Project (https://www.genomicsengland.co.uk/).

Previously Chris was an Associate Professor in Applied Statistics Genomics at the Welcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford and a Lecturer in Statistics at Imperial College London. His original training was in Engineering at Cambridge but became interested by biomedical research during my doctoral studies in Statistics in Oxford.

Interesting Fact:

As a teenager Chis wanted to be a digital animation artist.

23/06/2017

Dr Iain Johnston has also been involved using mathematical modelling and statistical inference to explore how mitochondrial diseases are inherited and manifest, including work on mtDNA dynamics and human population diversity (paper; free preprint; blog article) which was included in the latest policy document on UK implementation of mitochondrial gene therapies
http://www.hfea.gov.uk/10557.html .

We're redesigning our website - we're keen for you to try it so we can hear your views on how it can be improved ahead of the official launch. Head on over to the

21/06/2017

Read more about Dr Iain Johnston work

Another was the discovery and mathematical description of spatially-embedded decision-making centres in plant embryos that process environmental information to determine when the plant germinates. This appeared very recently in PNAS http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/05/31/1704745114 and has been covered by the Daily Mail, IFL Science, and several other news and online outlets.

National Academy of Sciences

19/06/2017

Dr Iain Johnston have been involed in a number of research projects to get to know more about what Iain does, please read..

One recent highlight was our work using mathematical modelling and large-scale genetic data to look at why some genes are retained in mitochondria, which was Science magazine's #1 favourite news story of 2016 http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/12/our-10-favorite-science-news-stories-2016 with coverage here http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/02/why-do-our-cells-power-plants-have-their-own-dna and here http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6276/903.long . Originals: (paper in Cell Systems; free preprint; blog article)

A compilation of some of our most liked and popular items

19/06/2017

I would like to introduce our tutor for Interdisciplinary Group Project;

Dr Iain Johnston

Role
Birmingham Fellow in Biosciences

About
Iain is a Birmingham Fellow based in Biosciences at the University of Birmingham. His group’s work combines mathematical modelling and statistics with laboratory and field experiments to explore how the bioenergetic machinery of plants and animals evolve, and how this machinery is controlled by the cell. In parallel, he is involved with several initiatives using maths and statistics to understand and improve healthcare, including vaccination strategies and so-called “three-parent baby” therapies for mitochondrial disease.

Iain came to biology through physics, which he studied as an undergraduate at Cambridge and as a postgraduate at Oxford. He was then awarded a Medical Research Council fellowship, based in Mathematics at Imperial College, using mathematical modelling to describe and predict features underlying mitochondrial disease, and continues to consult with clinicians and the UK HFEA health policy body on therapies for these diseases.

His current work on plants aims to understand and improve plant performance in response to changing climates and environmental challenges.

Interesting Fact
Iain is a fan of heavy metal music and a while back wrote a script to map musical influences within the genre http://chaoticsymmetry.co.uk/MetalMap/index.html

Produced by parsing Wikipedia pages for links in the same sentence as "influence" and "inspire", and recursing over those containing "metal" and "genre" or "band". Start point is "Death Metal". Edges are undirected as yet, due to the difficulty of parsing variants on "influences" and "influenced by"...