MSc and Third year projects
I am happy to supervise student projects in the multidisciplinary
areas of computational intelligence and computational systems biology.
I am keen on working closely with motivated MSc/3rd students on the
following projects:
Myeloma treatment evaluation system
This project aims to develop an user-friendly web-based tool for
clinicians to evaluate the effect of treatments on myeloma patients. The
project student will use web-based programming languages such as Perl,
Python or Java to create this tool. This project will be co-supervised
by Dr Mark Drayson in College of Medical and Dental Sciences.
Closed-loop evolutionary
multi-objective optimisation for systems biology
Recently, closed-loop evolutionary multi-objective optimisation
algorithms have been applied to many areas of science such as
evolutionary robotics, microbiology and biochemistry. This project will
focus on the development of a closed-loop optimisation system for the
automated control (and optimisation) of a mass spectrometer for
measuring important biochemicals. This research is a very important
component of the University of Birmingham’s new £1m Systems Science for
Health initiative. This project is challenging but offers a unique and
exciting opportunity to get first-hand knowledge of a real-world
application of computational intelligence to systems biology. This
project will be co-supervised by Professor Mark Viant in the School of
Biosciences and Ralf Weber in the Centre for Systems Biology.
Development of a XML
database system for systems biology
In order to store large amounts of experimental data from systems
biology experiments and subsequently to share them among the research
community, it is necessary to build a database based on an open source
and standardised data format. This project provides an exciting
opportunity to tackle this urgent need by developing a database system
based on open source standardised data format XML and native XML
database. This XML database system, once developed, will be used in the
Centre for Systems Biology and by researchers involved with the
University of Birmingham’s new £1m Systems Science for Health
initiative to store experimental data from “metabolomics” experiments.
The knowledge and practical experience gained from this project would
be valuable for the student’s future career in IT and bioinformatics.
This project will be co-supervised by Professor Mark Viant in the
School of Biosciences and Ralf Weber in the Centre for Systems Biology.
Due to the scale of this project, it is open to TWO MSc students who
will work together to develop different aspects of the database.