Dr Alex Lubbock
Alex is the Head of Advanced Research Computing at the Franklin.
He holds degrees in computer science and physics (BSc Hons., Leeds), intelligent systems (MSc, UCL) and computational systems medicine (PhD, Edinburgh), where his PhD thesis was on network biology and machine learning approaches to cancer metastasis and treatment response. He continued his PhD work during a short postdoc at Edinburgh, funded by an MRC Translational Medicine Fellowship.
He then started a postdoc in systems biology of cancer at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee, USA), where he was later promoted to Research Assistant Professor. He worked on multiple projects, including the PySB biochemical simulation framework and he developed Thunor, a web application for high throughput screens of cell line proliferation data. He also led training sessions and “hackathons” at US National Science Foundation-funded workshops on cellular modelling and systems biology software.
Advanced Research Computing
The Franklin develops state of the art digital infrastructure to enable cutting edge research. Our interdisciplinary research generates a variety of data structures and sizes that all need to be stored, curated and processed to give data driven insights.
Applied Biological Data Science
How could we build cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence tools to translate biological data into scientific insights and ultimately to guide medical decision-making?
Applying artificial intelligence to accelerate the discovery of anti-viral nanobodies
Nanobodies are single domain antibodies derived from the unique heavy chain only immunoglobulins of camelids. Their rapid generation is important for pandemic preparedness as they can be used in diagnostic tests. We will use machine learning tools to accelerate the discovery of nanobodies to norovirus, which causes stomach flu.