Current PhD Students

You can find a link to PhD projects I am currently offering here.

  • Frankie Patten-Elliott is a PhD student working with Simon Preston, Rich Wilkinson and me in Nottingham. He is working on methods to build mathematical models for the kinetics of drug binding to ion channels.

  • Joseph Shuttleworth is a PhD student on the Maths and Stats for Modelling and Prediction (MaP) doctoral training programme in Nottingham working with me, Simon Preston and Chon Lok Lei on optimising experiments for building ion channel models.

  • Ines Krissaane is a PhD student working with Rich Wilkinson and me in Nottingham, Jeremy Oakley in Sheffield and Ted Meeds at Microsoft Research to examine statistical inference in the presence of model misspecification/discrepancy.

  • Yann-Stanislas Barral is a PhD student based in Hoffman-LaRoche, Basel, Switzerland working with industrial supervisors, me, Michael Clerx, and David Gavaghan in Oxford to look at predicting drug effects on adult human cardiomyocytes.

Current Postdocs

  • Alejandra Herrera Reyes is a postdoctoral researcher on my Wellcome fellowship. She is looking at inference methods for ion channel and action potential models.

  • Michael Clerx is a senior postdoctoral researcher on my Wellcome fellowship. He is looking at ways to build action potential models and tailor them to particular cells. He previously worked on our BBSRC WebLab grant to incorporate a description of model fitting to real experimental data into a reproducible web-based framework, to improve the reliability of cardiac models and their link to datasets.

  • Luca del Core is a postdoctoral researcher on my Wellcome fellowship. He is looking at ways to infer drug actions from cellular level measurements.

Current Software Engineers

  • Kwabena Amponsah is a research software engineer (RSE) working as part of our BBSRC BBR grant for Chaste in association with the Nottingham Digital Research team and colleagues in Sheffield and Oxford.

  • Maurice Hendrix is a research software engineer (RSE) working as part of my Wellcome fellowship in association with the Nottingham Digital Research team.

  • I am one of the Chaste team behind the Chaste C++ computational biology software that runs many of our simulations.

Visiting Researchers

  • Chon Lok Lei is a Macau research fellow at the University of Macau. He is working with us looking at choosing and parameterising ion channel models whilst accounting for experimental artefacts in the data we use to build the models.

Past Postdocs

  • Dominic Whittaker was a senior postdoctoral researcher on my Wellcome fellowship. He looked at models of drug-ion channel interaction and how we might build these efficiently and robustly for new compounds. He is now working in a GlaxoSmithKline Quantitative Systems Pharmacology group in Stevenage, UK.

  • Sanmitra Ghosh worked as part of my Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale fellowship looking at emulators for cardiac electrophysiology models at the cell level, and model selection at the ion channel scale. He is now working as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Medical Research Council Biostatistics Unit in Cambridge.

  • John Walmsley worked on methods to describe and predict model discrepancy in ion channel models. He went on to do a Postdoc with Michael Sacks at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He is now a Staff Scientist at BridgeSource Medical in Texas.

  • Ken Wang was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Roche Safety Pharmacology group in Basel, Switzerland, and I was her Academic Mentor. She has subsequently taken on a permanent job there.

  • Kylie Beattie continued her PhD work to improve the identification of kinetics of the hERG channel, funded by 2020 Science and an EPSRC Impact Acceleration Award with the aim of characterising and modelling drug binding for pharmaceutical use. Kylie then worked for the US Food & Drug Administration to assist with ion channel modelling as part of the CiPA effort. She is now employed by GlaxoSmithKline Computational Toxicology Group in Stevenage, UK.

Past Software Engineers

  • Geoff Williams is a software engineer and was the original developer of the ApPredict web portal for safety pharmacology. Geoff is now working as a developer at the EMBL in Cambridge, UK.

Past PhD Students

  • Aditi Agrawal 2023. Aditi was a student at the Oxford Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science doing a joint PhD with David Gavaghan in Oxford, Roche Safety Pharmacology group in Basel, Switzerland, and us. She focussed on models of the L-type calcium channel and drug action. She is now working in management consultancy for biotech.

  • Chon Lok Lei 2020. Chon Lok did his Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science PhD with us, David Gavaghan in Oxford, and Roche Safety Pharmacology group in Basel, Switzerland. He worked on designing electrophysiology experiments to capture what we need to know about the amount of each different ion current and the detailed kinetics of the hERG current. We used the techniques to look at hERG’s temperature dependence as well as build a model of patch clamp amplifier compensations and the effects of errors in these. He is now a Macau Research Fellow (see Visiting Researchers). Link to thesis

  • Louise Bowler 2018. Louise developed a framework for tissue simulations of stem-cell derived cardiomyocytes that includes a mixture of cellular electrophysiology types, and used it to perform simulations of expected drug action to be compared with that observed in experiments. She is now working as part of a Research Software team in data science at the Alan Turing Institute in London. Link to thesis

  • Ross Johnstone 2018. In partnership with industrial supervisors Liudmila Polonchuk and Mark Davies at Roche, and Remi Bardenet at Lille University, Ross looked at how to tailor mathematical cardiac electrophysiology models to individual cells by using Bayesian Inference to inform experimental design to constrain the parameters we wish to calibrate on a cell-specific basis. Link to thesis

  • Kylie Beattie 2015. In partnership with GlaxoSmithKline, Kylie used early ion-channel screening data to predict the results of later animal-based safety tests, with the aim of refinement, reduction and replacement. She also did work on new protocols to improve the identification of kinetics of the hERG channel in patch-clamp experiments. Link to thesis

  • Ken Wang 2015. Ken developed new methods to study cardiac electrophysiology on pseudo-2D cardiac tissue slices, to examine the cellular heterogeneity with different regions of the heart. Link to thesis

  • John Walmsley 2013. John investigated the role of heterogeneities and variability in cardiac electrophysiology models, he went on to do a postdoc at Maastricht University, then worked with me on a short project as a Postdoc.

Past Project Students

  • Mandeep Gill (doctoral training centre project)
  • Ryan Elkins (UG pharmacy sandwich year project)
  • Katie McElligott (MSc maths project)
  • Shauna Carter (UG maths summer project)
  • Joseph Shuttleworth (UG maths summer project)
  • Jingchao Zhai (MSc statistics project)
  • Weilu Wang (MSc statistics project)
  • Sarah Robson (MSc statistics project)