A fully funded PhD Studentship is available to work with Dr Anna Lobley, Associate Director, Biological Data Science at Exscientia, Dr Arkaitz Zubiaga, Senior Lecturer at the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University London, and Dr Claudia Cabrera, Lecturer in Bioinformatics at the William Harvey Research Institute at Queen Mary University London.

Awards will cover UK tuition fees, stipend at UKRI rate (currently £19,668), and a consumable allowance for 4 years (pro-rata for part-time applicants).

*Project Description:*

Methods for automated target and biomarker identification typically involve ranking genes and proteins according to indication relevance criteria. A typical process then involves traversing scientific literature for supporting evidence. However, many age-related western world diseases bear the hallmarks of complex heterogeneous conditions that vary along a spectrum of disease severity. They frequently involve multiple systems and pathways. Hence selection pools comprise many hundreds to thousands of genes. Selecting the best targets and stratification biomarkers from a large candidate pool presents a significant challenge in drug discovery. Current approaches are at best semi-automated or rely on expert opinion. This means it is difficult to avoid bias in such decision making tasks. Decision theory is one branch of Artificial Intelligence that can be applied to help resolve these complexities. Automated reasoning and argumentation theory are two appropriate branches of natural language processing well suited to the task. The aim of this project is to fully automate target and biomarker selections using a combination of NLP-based and recommendation methods. The end goal is to generate unbiased decisions from a complex network of information relationships.

We are seeking a highly motivated students who are passionate about contributing to biological knowledge through the application of NLP to large text corpora and biomolecular data sets.

The deadline for applications is May 1st 2023 and projects start in September 2023.

For ​more ​details​, see https://www.findaphd.com/phds/project/target-biomarker-selection-using-syste...

For more on eligibility and how to apply, see https://www.qmul.ac.uk/deri/ukri-aidd-doctoral-training-programme/apply/