Statistical Genetics and Epidemiology
The group carries out a broad range of computational biology research including Genetics, Genomics and Epidemiology. The research is both theoretical and applied, generating both new methods and genetic and epidemiological insights as well as computational tools and software. In Statistical Genetics we work to identify how mutations drive variability among people in health and disease risk, to understand the history of our and other species, and to understand the forces that have shaped evolution across the tree of life, whilst in Epidemiology we work to gain robust insights into the transmission and control of outbreaks, epidemics and pandemics of infectious diseases including COVID-19, Ebola, H1N1 influenza, MERS, rabies, dengue and Zika.
Within the University of Oxford, we have close links to the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, the Pandemic Sciences Institute and the Big Data Institute. Members of the group have played central roles in some of the most important international collaborative projects in human genetics such as the HapMap Project, the Wellcome Trust Case-Control Consortium, the 1000 Genomes Project, the People of the British Isles Project, the Haplotype Reference Consortium, UK Biobank and the 100,000 Genomes Project. Others have worked collaboratively with the World Health Organization.
Join us for doctoral study
Our research group is truly collaborative. Most epidemiology students are jointly supervised by someone based elsewhere (including other University of Oxford departments such as Biology, the Nuffield Department of Medicine and the Mathematical Institute) or other organizations (including the World Health Organization, the Zoological Society London, the UKHSA, the University of Liverpool and Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine). We currently have around 20 research students.
Take a look at our research, and if you're interested, get in contact.
Working in a group with such a wide range of interconnected research, from examining the social implications of public health policy to proving mathematical properties of epidemiological models, provides a great opportunity for learning and collaboration.
Matthew Penn, DPhil Student
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Breadcrumb
Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Research Fellow
About Me
I am a postdoctoral research assistant in computational statistics and machine learning at the University of Oxford supervised by Arnaud Doucet and funded by the CoSInES project. I recently have joined the algorithms and inference working group in Next Generation Event Horizon Telescope (ngEHT) collaboration to help improve the algorithms used to model and image supermassive black holes. Before this, I completed a PhD in Statistics with Alexandre Bouchard-Côté at the University of British Columbia.
Research Interests
Monte Carlo methods, scalable Bayesian inference, parallel tempering, sequential Monte Carlo, information geometry, statistical physics.
Publications
Contact Details
Email: saifuddin.syed@stats.ox.ac.uk
Office: 1.18
Pronouns: He/Him/They
Breadcrumb
Postdoctoral Researcher
About Me
I am a computational biologist developing methods for structural biology, primarily cryo-EM for drug discovery.
I hold a BSc degree in Biotechnology, another one in Computer Science and an MSc in Biophysics. I did my PhD at the Spanish National Center of Biotechnology (CSIC) and the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), under the supervision of Professor Jose Maria Carazo and Dr Joan Segura. During that time, I developed machine learning algorithms for structural biology, including BIPSPI and DeepEMhancer.
I joined the Department of Statistics in 2020 where, in collaboration with XChem, I worked on AI algorithms for fragment-based drug discovery for almost two years. Currently, I am trying to improve cryo-EM algorithms to facilitate drug discovery.
Research Interests
- Machine Learning / Deep Learning
- Structural biology
- Cryo-EM
- Drug discovery
Publications
Research Groups
Research Students
Breadcrumb
Florence Nightingale Bicentenary Research Fellow
About Me
I'm currently working in the Department as a Florence Nightingale Bicentennial Fellow. I previously completed a postdoc with Chris Holmes and Arnaud Doucet, working on causal inference and conformal prediction. Before that I completed my DPhil as part of the AIMS CDT under the supervision of Arnaud Doucet and George Deligiannidis. My thesis covered several topics in (primarily Bayesian) computational statistics and machine learning, including Monte Carlo methods and deep generative modelling. Before they left Oxford, I also worked with Frank Wood and Hongseok Yang on probabilistic programming.
Research Interests
I am broadly interested in ensuring the robustness of complex, safety-critical systems. I have worked on techniques for reliable uncertainty quantification, causal inference, as well as a variety of topics across machine learning. An underlying focus of my research is on methodology that is valid under minimal assumptions, which allows their application in large-scale real-world settings where more specific assumptions may be difficult to justify.
Publications
Contact Details
Email: rob.cornish@stats.ox.ac.uk
Office: 1.11