Hi 👋

I am curios person who welcomes challenges and embraces new opportunities to expand my knoweldge space. Currently I am a PhD candidate at University of York working on cancer research between the Department of Electronics and Biology. Hitherto from industrial ventures gained invaluable technical and soft skills.

Academic life

My main research interest is to explore multi-omics integration in cancer research, with a focus on muscle invasive bladder cancer (MIBC). I am also interested in creating data visualisation tools and developing software engineering operations in bioinformatics.

Alongside my research I also teach in the Department of Electronics. I was a lab demonstrator in the Introduction to Programming module in my first year, and then went on to become a lab leader for the same module the following year. My responsibilities included leading lab sessions of up to sixty students, delivering presentations and interactive demo sessionsfor the core programming concepts in Python and C.

Since 2020, I have been the Postgraduate Student Representative in the Department of Electronic Engineering responsible with identifying and solving student concerns and course-based issues to improve their academic experience.

• I am part of the Intelligent Systems Group from School of Physics, Engineering and Technology, Jack Birch Unit (JBU) and York Biomedical Research Institute.

• York Against Cancer or YAC is an amazing local charity that funds cancer research in JBU.

Projects

PhD project

My PhD is an interdisciplinary effort between Electronics and Biology. I am interested in advancing the progress in personalised treatments of bladder cancer by improving its stratification. The project involves applying Machine Learning methods to different omics datasets (molecular data), followed by biological interpretations of the results.

Complex Network 2023

Complex Network 2023.

Visualisation tool

As a software engineer, I believe that data and tools should be openly available to the scientific community. The data visualisation tool which I am currently working on as a side project for the Jack Birch Unit group (JBU, Biology), centralises, visualises, and compares multiple datasets containing gene expression.

The tool is a web app (Python),designed with scalability & maintainability in mind, which makes it easy to add new datasets and web pages with different figures, and to improve the graphs and the stats displayed. I extended the functionality to display volcano plots, pi plots and scatter plots from Differential Expression Analysis (DEA) data. This allows researchers to find the significant genes between different groups. Adding new data for DEA is as simple as moving the generated DEA to a folder and the tool displays the new data. We are currently testing and continuously improving the tool in JBU and will release it to the general public in the coming months.

For this tool, I received the York Open Research Award which supports efforts across the University of York to make research more accessible and open.

Master project - Spiking Neural Networks

The aim of my project was to investigate the applications of Spiking Neural Networks (SNN) in self-driving cars using Spike-Timing-Dependent Plasticity. The system proposed using a real-physics engine, AirSim, to simulate a car that is controlled by two separate SNNs, designed to emulate the sensory-motor coupling and to control the steering and throttle of the vehicle.

The project was an opportunity to expand my knowledge in this field from the perspective of neuroscience and psychology as well as to learn about conventional ML models such as DQN. My work on this project was awarded with the “Simomics Prize for the project showing most potential for impact” prize.

Awards

Best 2nd Year poster

The poster I presented at the internal Electronic Engineering conference received the Award for the 2nd Year best Poster Award. The poster covered the work I did in reclustering the TCGA’s MIBC bladder cancer cohort. One of the main findings was the split of Basal/Squamous tumours which are correlated with immune response.

Visualisation tool

The Visualisation tool was awared the York Open Research Award

Master thesis

My master thesis, which focused on investigating the applications of SNN, received the “Simomics Prize for the project showing most potential for impact”.

Startup School Founder Track by YCombinator (2017 batch) - Participant

I received a participation certificate in the first batch of the YCombinator’s Founder Track Programmer.

GoOut situated in the 20% of the applicants who were accepted to the Founder Track Programme, which consisted of getting support from active founders that have been through Y Combinator. The course offered valuable insight into startup mechanics, which had a direct impact on the development of GoOut, shifting our focus on developing the Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

I found that the work forr a PhD it’s very similar to the one for a startup, thus the skills gained in this programme were valuable in my experience as a PhD student.

Conferences / workshops

• International Bladder Cancer Network (Sep ‘22)
• EE internal Conferences (June ‘22)
• Research Away Day 2022 (Sep ‘22)
• NorthernBUG (Sep ‘22)
• York Biomedical Research Institute (Sep ‘22)

Interests

After graduating I’ve become attracted in capturing nature in different instances (with a smartphone) and this transformed my walks in a continuous exploration process for the new. My childhood holidays were spent in the mountains and the love for them remains today through snowboarding.

I became fascinated by the brain and consciousness after my final year project, thus my current reading list involves books around these topics.

Industry experience

Software Dev/Eng.