Professor Iain Styles

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I have now moved to the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast.

Until 30 April 2023 I was Professor of Computational Life Sciences in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham. My research interests are in the development of new computational methods for understanding complex biological experiments.

I was also the Turing University Lead, providing the primary research link between the Institute and the university.

I remain a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute.

I was the Director of the Baskerville EPSRC Tier 2 High Performance Computing facility.

Contact Details

Research

My main research interest is the development of new computational and mathematical approaches to model and understand complex biological phenomena, combining principled models informed by domain expertise with data-driven methods. Problems in which I am currently interested include:

• Mass spectrometry, where we are using advanced methods to probe the chemical composition of biological samples (with Professor Helen Cooper.
• Single-molecule microscopy, which allows us to investigate the spatial distribution of and interactions between single protein molecules in exquisite detail (with many colleagues in COMPARE).
• Near-infrared measurements of brain state, as part of the BITMAP project.
• Interpretable machine learning for modelling biological data (with Ales Leonardis).

More details of my work in this area, including my publications, can be found on my Research page.

If you think you would like to study for a PhD with me, then please read my research page carefully so that you have some idea of what I'm interested in before contacting me. If you are a UK student (or an EU student who has been in the UK for at least three years) then I recommend you consider applying to the EPSRC-funded Doctoral Training Centre in Physical Sciences for Healthcare - Sci-Phy-4-Health. If you're a scientist or engineer who wants to do a PhD at the life sciences interface with a focus on developing next-generation physical science techniques to address major challenges in healthcare, then Sci-Phy could be for you - fully funded scholarships for four years of study are available.

Teaching

I'm not teaching any classes at present, but I am available for project supervision for PG students in summer 2018 and UG students in 2018/19. A list of topics for prospective project students is available here.

Service

• Member of the EPSRC Peer Review College
• Reviewer of research funding applications for EPSRC, BBSRC, Cancer Research UK, The Royal Society.
• Associate Editor, Medical Physics (2008)
• Reviewing for the following academic journals and conferences (in no particular order): IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation, Theoretical Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Medical Image Computing and Computer Aided Intervention (MICCAI), IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, Mathematical Problems in Engineering, Optics Express, Biomedical Optics Express, Inverse Problems in Science and Engineering, Acta Ophthalmologica, Journal of Biomedical Optics, IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Natural Computation, Medical Image Analysis, Biochimica et Biophysica Acta Proteins and Proteomics, PLOS ONE, Mass Spectromety Reviews, Journal of Biophotonics, Analytical Chemistry, Journal of the Optical Society of America A
• Co-organiser and programme committee member for Medical Image Understanding and Analysis (MIUA) 2013, Birmingham, July 2013.
• Programme Committee, European Conference on Biomedical Optics 2015.

Biographical Note

Prior to taking up my current appointment, I was an RCUK Academic Fellow from 2007-2011 and a research fellow with Ela Claridge on the EPSRC project "Physics-based image interpretation to aid the detection of early signs of retinopathies". I was awarded my PhD in Theoretical Physics in 2003, from the Theoretical Physics group in Birmingham, where I was supervised by Martin Long.