About Me

PhD Candidate

I am currently studying for a PhD in Computer Science at The University of Bristol. I am part of the Computational Genomics research group. My work focuses on the interaction between DNA sequence features and protein sequence and structure; I am particularly interested in the impact of the intron/exon architecture and splicing on protein domains and disorder. A better understanding of this may help me to develop tools for performing protein sequence annotation directly on DNA sequences. This is one strategy to help deal with the ever-increasing volume of sequence data by skipping some of the costly steps in analysis.

Computer Science Undergrad

I graduated from The University of Bristol in 2012 with a first-class degree in computer science. It was a pretty intense four years, but also very fun and rewarding. The highlight for me was the 3rd year group project (oft referred to as the ‘games project’ although you are not obliged make a game). We developed a game set inside the human body: the player takes control of a variety of different cells to help defend the body from invading viruses – from a red blood cell who must defend the platelets to a white blood cell who must outrun a deadly swarm. The game is played out inside a motion simulator, which was really fun to work with. I’m hoping to find some better footage of our game, but the video below shows the work from all the groups in our year.

Our group also managed the rare achievement of working together without incident and all agreeing on equal effort (and mark distribution) at the end of the project!

Running

To keep fit, I try to run regularly. Mostly on road, but I also enjoy cross-country. Over the last year, I have been able to stay clear of annoying knee injuries which had kept me away from running for a number of years. I wrote about my progress in a recent blog post.

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