People

Dr Animesh Acharjee

Assistant Professor

Animesh Acharjee is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Analytics and AI (Health Data Science) and Deputy Programme Director, MSc in Health Data Science (Dubai). 

Dr Csilla Várnai

Research Fellow & CRUK Bioinformatician

Dr Várnai is a Research Fellow in bioinformatics and a CRUK bioinformatician. Her research is at the interface of experimental and computational biology, working closely with molecular biologists to understand the link between the 3D organisation of the genome and its function in gene regulation, in health and disease. Her expertise is in method development for and application of statistical analysis of genomics data, molecular modelling, Bayesian inference, optimisation and machine learning.

Dr Wayne Croft

Senior Research Fellow

Dr Croft's research background has focussed on cellular signalling, combining both ‘wet-lab’ experimental work with computational modelling to gain novel insights into how cells sense and respond to noisy and dynamic extracellular signals.

As a Senior Research Fellow in the Institute of Immunology and Immunotherapy his work now focusses on utilising Omics data to further our understanding of Immune response in the solid tumor, hematopoietic stem cell transplant and viral infection research settings.

Dr Furqan Aziz

Research Fellow

Dr Aziz is a Research Fellow with interests in developing and applying novel graph-based algorithms and network-based mining approaches within biomedical and clinical settings.

Dr Andrey Barsky

Research Fellow

Dr Barsky is a Research Fellow with interests in artificial intelligence, deep learning, and computer vision. He currently works on multimodal representation learning in medical imaging and clinical datasets.

Dr Luke Slater

Research Fellow

Luke Slater is a Research Fellow with an interest in ontology and ontology accessories, and their combination with other interdisciplinary techniques to gain novel and practically useful insights into information.

Dr Yuanwei Xu

Research Fellow

Dr Xu is a Research Fellow in statistical computing. He studied applied mathematics and further researched computational chemistry. He has worked on TB outbreak reconstruction with bacterial genomics and epidemiology data, using mathematical modelling and Bayesian statistics. His research interests are computational biology, biomedical informatics and machine learning applications in healthcare.

Professor James Bentley Brown

Chair of Environmental Bioinformatics

Professor Brown’s lab works to link genome dynamics to ecosystem functions – to understand how the information encoded in genomes gives rise to complex and profoundly responsive systems.

Professor Christopher Yau

Reader in Computational Biology

Dr Yau was an expert in statistical methodologies for machine learning and data science and specialised in genomic science, particularly cancer.

Dr Boris Noyvert

Honorary Research Fellow in Bioinformatics

Dr Noyvert is interested in genomics of human diseases and human health.

Dr Chris Middleton 

Honorary Research Fellow

Dr Middleton's research interests are in using next generation sequencing to investigate chromatin structure, transcription factor binding and gene expression during cell differentiation. This enables us to gain an insight into the changes that occur within the genome when cells go through differentiation.

Dr Alina Bazarova

Research Fellow

Alina was interested in applying various mathematical methods in biology, medicine and economics as well as developing novel statistical tests based on the limit theorems in probability theory.

Dr Anshita Goel

Research Fellow

Dr Goel's expertise was in the application of next-generation sequencing technologies towards understanding how changes in genetic sequence across cell types or population cohorts can be used to understand human health and disease. 

Dr Journi Kvist 

Research Fellow

Dr Kvist's research focused on the role of epigenetic regulation in the emerging model species of water flea (Daphnia). He studied how genetic and environmental factors affected epigenetic regulation such as DNA methylation and histone modifications, and how these modifications in turn alter phenotypic traits.

Dr Wakil Sarfaraz

Research Fellow

Dr Sarafaz carried out research on developing and simulating mathematical models that described the spatiotemporal patterns observed in data acquired from Experimental Haematology. 

Dr Tanmay Basu

Research Fellow

Dr Basu is a Research Fellow in biomedical informatics with interests in developing methods and tools using novel computational natural language processing, text mining, machine learning and sentiment analysis techniques for potential knowledge discovery in electronic health records, social media, biomedical data and other types of text data.

Dr Yi Pan

CRUK Birmingham Centre Biostatistician

Dr Pan is a Biostatistician based at the Centre for Computational Biology. He is responsible for the design and analysis of bioinformatics / computational biology experiments across the CRUK Birmingham Centre and the College of Medical and Dental Sciences.

Dr Ryan Pepper

Senior Research Software Engineer

Ryan completed an MSci in Theoretical Physics at the University of Birmingham in 2015 and then undertook a PhD in the CDT for Next Generation Computational Modelling at the University of Southampton, where he studied nanomagnetic systems and developed research software for the study of these.  After his PhD he worked at Siemens on a commercial CFD package for the electronics industry, and joined the Research Software.

 R.pepper@bham.ac.uk

Dr Inti Anabela Pagnuco

Research Fellow

Dr Pagnuco is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences. Her principal interests are genomic diseases and how to use machine learning techniques to gain novel insights into large datasets.

Dr Joel Mitchell

Research Fellow

Joel Mitchell is a Research Fellow in the Institute of Cancer and Genomic Sciences with an interest in topology and how it may be used to gain novel insights into large datasets.

John Williams 

Research Fellow

John Williams is a Research Fellow in behavioural multiomics data integration and analysis. He works to understand the biological basis of complex and diverse behavioural phenotypes by modelling genomic, transcriptomic and clinical data.

Dr Saisakul Chernbumroong

Senior Research Fellow

Dr Chernbumroong has substantial experience in data analysis and modelling in medical application using AI and machine learning techniques. Her research interests include human activity recognition, sensor data analysis and application of AI/machine learning techniques in healthcare application.

Dr Justina Žurauskienė

Lecturer in Data Analytics and Statistical Machine Learning

Dr Žurauskienė has expertise and research interests in mathematical modelling, statistical machine learning and method development with applications focusing on genomic data and women’s health.

Dr Danesh Moradigaravand

Lecturer
Programme Director MSc Bioinformatics Dubai

Dr Moradigaravand’s research aims to provide a better understanding of evolutionary dynamics of bacterial populations. 

Victor Roth Cardoso

Research Fellow

Victor Roth Cardoso is an engineer turned bioinformatician. He is completing his PhD at the University of Birmingham, applying novel machine learning techniques and data tools to the identification of biomarkers, stratification of patients and integration and analysis of different health data. He has extensive experience with clinical data systems.