Dr Christopher Yau
+44 (0) 1 865 285386 (Department)
+44 (0) 1 865 285364 (Direct)
+44 (0) 1 865 272595 (Fax)
Biographical sketch
I graduated with a degree in Engineering from Trinity College at the University of Cambridge in 2004 and moved to Oxford to study for a doctorate. After completing an initial research training year at the Life Sciences Interface Doctoral Training Centre, I subsequently joined the Department of Statistics, where I completed my doctoral research in 2009 under the supervision of Professor Chris Holmes.
I was previously an Associate Member of the Oxford-Man Institute for Quantitative Finance and a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics working on CNV-related projects as part of the Wellcome Trust Case Consortium.
I currently hold a Medical Research Council Specialist Training Fellowship in Biomedical Informatics (2009-2012)
Research interests
Methodology: Bayesian Statistics, Machine Learning, Pattern Recognition
Applications: Bioinformatics, Image Analysis, Signal Processing
About my research
My primary research objectives are the development of rigorous statistical methods for the analysis of high-throughput genomic datasets, in particular, the identification of genomic copy number alterations from single nucleotide polymorphism data obtained from heterogeneous tumour samples.
These methods include the use of novel applications of cutting edge Bayesian nonparametric and decision-theoretic methodology for bioinformatics analysis and computational techniques that allow these methods to be scalable to real genomic datasets.
I am also interested in applications of signal processing and machine learning approaches to other biological problems including biomedical image analysis and systems biology.
Selected publications
C. Yau and C. Holmes. (2011) Hierarchical Bayesian nonparametric mixture models for clustering with variable relevance determination. Bayesian Analysis 6(2), 329-352
Yau, C., Papaspiliopoulos, O., Roberts, G. and Holmes, C. (2011) Bayesian non-parametric hidden Markov models with applications in genomics. Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series B (Statistical Methodology) 73(1), 37-57
McGuinness, L., Taylor, C., Yau, C., Langenhan, R., Christian, H., Donnelly, P. and Emptage, N. (2010) Presynaptic NMDARs in the hippocampus facilitate transmitter release at theta frequency. Neuron 68(6), 1109-1127
Lee, A., Yau, C., Giles, M., Doucet, A. and Holmes, C. (2010) On the utility of graphics cards to perform massively parallel simulation of advanced Monte Carlo methods. Journal of Computational and Graphical Statistics 4(19), 769-789
Yau, C., Mouradov, D., Jorissen, R., Colella, S., Mirza, G., Steers, G., Harris, A., Ragoussis, J., Sieber, O. and Holmes, C. (2010) A statistical approach for detecting genomic aberrations in heterogeneous tumor samples from single nucleotide polymorphism genotyping data. Genome Biology 10(9), R2
The Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium (2010) Genome-wide association study of copy number variation in 16,000 cases of eight common diseases and 3,000 shared controls. Nature 464, 713-720
L. Winchester, C. Yau and J. Ragoussis (2009) Comparing CNV detection methods for SNP arrays. Briefings in Functional Genomics and Proteomics 8(5), 353-366
C. Yau and C. C. Holmes (2008) CNV discovery using SNP genotyping arrays. Cytogenetics Genome Research 123, 307-31
E. Giannoulatou, C. Yau*, S. Colella, J. Ragoussis, C.C. Holmes (2008) GenoSNP: a Variational Bayes within-sample SNP genotyping algorithm that does not require a reference population. Bioinformatics 24(19), 2209-14
K. Allen, C. Yau and J. A. Noble (2008) A Recursive, Stochastic Vessel Segmentation Framework that Robustly Handles Bifurcations. Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA)
G. J. Buttrick, L.M.A. Beaumont, J. Leitch, C. Yau, J. R. Hughes, and J. G. Wakefield (2008) Akt regulates centrosome migration and spindle orientation in the early Drosophila melanogaster embryo, The Journal of Cell Biology 180(3), 537-548
S. Colella, C. Yau*, J. Taylor, G. Mirza, H. Butler, P. Clouston, A. S. Bassett, A. Seller, C. C. Holmes and J. Ragoussis (2007) QuantiSNP: an Objective Bayes Hidden-Markov Model to detect and accurately map copy number variation using SNP genotyping data. Nucleic Acids Research 35(6)
C. Yau and J. G. Wakefield (2007) Quantitative analysis of chromosome dynamics in early Drosophila embryos. Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro
* Joint first author
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