Daniel de Vassimon Manela

DPhil in Statistics student

About Me

I am a first year DPhil student interested in applications of causal inference to the biomedical/clinical spaces and am supervised by Robin Evans. Before starting at Oxford, I worked in the pharmaceutical space and worked on developing ML methods to address problems in the clinical spaces. Even earlier to that, I completed degrees in Physical Natural Sciences and Computational Statistics/ML from the University of Cambridge and UCL, respectively.

Research Interests

I am interested in developing machine learning methods and specifically causal inference techniques to address challenges in clinical and medical spaces. Recent explosion of clinical data lead to a variety of attempts to draw meaningful treatment inferences from observational data. However, naive applications of non-causal methods can lead to biased findings, which could have critical impacts on patients.

My research seeks to address these challenges and learn unbiased effects from both observational and randomised trial data. Of particular interest is the challenging case when learning from data with unobserved confounders.

Contact Details

Email: daniel.manela@mansfield.ox.ac.uk

Office: 1.07

Supervisor

Fabian Spoendlin

Doctoral student

About Me

I am a 1st year DPhil student in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG) in the Department of Statistics and I am interested in developing deep learning methods for computational drug development. Currently, the production of new drugs requires tedious wet lab experiments that are associated with high costs. Computational methods have the potential to greatly facilitate the drug discovery process. Specifically, my research focuses on antibodies, a class of proteins of great interest to the pharmaceutical industry, and I am working on improving methods for predicting antibody structures and flexibility from sequence data. Before starting my PhD at the Department of Statistics, I completed an undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at UCL (2020) and a Master's degree in Biochemistry at the University of Oxford (2022).

Contact Details

Email: fabian.spoendlin@stats.ox.ac.uk

Office: 2.17

Pronouns: He/Him

Cathal Mills

DPhil in Statistics student

About Me

I am a Second Year DPhil Statistics student funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). I develop biomathematical and statistical methods to model, and better understand, the spread of infectious diseases. I have a particular interest in modelling climate-sensitive, vector-borne diseases such as dengue fever. My undergraduate degree was a BSc in Economics and Finance (Major in Maths and Statistics) from University College Dublin. Subsequently, I completed the MSc Statistics at Imperial College London, where I specialised in Biostatistics. My MSc research thesis involved Bayesian phylodynamic modelling of age-specific transmission dynamics of HIV.

Research Interests

  • Development of new mathematical and statistical modelling techniques for inference of dengue transmission dynamics.
  • Unifying statistical, machine learning, and biomathematical methods to provide an integrated approach for retrospective modelling and probabilistic forecasting of infectious diseases.
  • Providing quantitative understanding of the effects of public health intervention strategies for infectious diseases.
  • Communicating research outputs to technical experts and the wider public.

Contact Details

Email: cathal.mills@linacre.ox.ac.uk

Office: G.01

Ning Zhang

Doctoral student

About Me

I am a DPhil student in Computational Discovery under the supervision of Mihai Cucuringu and Xiaowen Dong. Prior to that, I received my MASc in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of British Columbia in 2022, and BSc in Physics from Nankai University in 2019.

Research Interests

My research interest lies in the intersection of statistics and computation. In particular, I seek to better understand computational tasks on graphs using tools such as the spectral method, high-dimensional statistics, optimization, ML, etc. I am excited to see the transformation of ideas across different research fields and am motivated to prove things built on interesting intuitions.

Contact Details

Email: ning.zhang@some.ox.ac.uk

Supervisor(s)

Prof Mihai Cucuringu

Xiaowen Dong

Shabana Akthar

HR and Finance Administrator

Areas of work

I am responsible for the day to day HR and Finance administration of the Department. I am involved with the full employee lifecycle, which include recruitment, onboarding and management of end of contracts, retirements and resignation. I manage employee contractual changes, payroll changes, probations, PDR and academic mid-period and end of period reviews. I assist with certificate of sponsorships and visa applications for new starters and visitors. I am responsible for a variety of financial tasks, mainly processing of invoices and expenses. I process travel insurance applications, organise payments for student teaching, demonstrating and lecturing.

 

Contact me for:

  • Recruitment
  • HR queries
  • Payroll queries
  • Travel insurance
  • Expense claims

Contact Details

Working pattern: From home

On maternity leave in 2023

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