Scholarship: Fully-funded
Degree: Ph.D
Nationality: International Students
Location: UK
Application deadlines: Open
Scholarship Description:
Dr. Bingxin Lu is a Surrey Future Fellow at the Section of Systems Biology and the Surrey Institute for People-Centred AI, University of Surrey. She has been awarded a three-year MRC new investigator grant to support this Postdoc position.
Previously, she was a Postdoc at University College London, focusing on dynamical modeling of chromosomal instability (CIN) in cancer genomes. Before that, she worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Genome Institute of Singapore, developing methods to analyze tumor heterogeneity and clonal evolution in liver and lung cancer genomes. She earned her PhD in Computational Biology from the National University of Singapore, where she developed machine learning and phylogenetic methods for lateral gene transfer. She also holds a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree from the Software Engineering Institute at East China Normal University, where she led the development of platforms for high-throughput biological data analysis, including RNA-Seq and proteomic data.
Her research spans computational biology, encompassing software engineering, machine learning, algorithms, statistics, phylogenetics, population genetics, and omics. She has created new methods and applied existing ones to address fundamental questions in species and cancer evolution. Her current focus is on the evolutionary dynamics of cancer genomes driven by CIN, which are critical for tumorigenesis and patient treatment but less studied than point mutations.
Available Subjects:
- Computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science
Eligibility criteria:
Required Qualifications
- PhD (or near completion) in computational biology, bioinformatics, computer science, or related fields with significant computing and mathematical/statistical modeling, ideally in phylogenetic method development (essential).
Desirable Qualifications
- Strong record of publications in international, peer-reviewed journals.
- Working knowledge of genomics, evolutionary biology, cancer biology, or population genetics.
- Undergraduate degree in computer science, mathematics, statistics, physics, engineering, or another quantitative discipline.
Essential Skills
- Proficiency with Unix-based systems and programming in multiple languages, including C++/C, Python, and R.
- Solid mathematical and statistical modeling skills, particularly in Markov models and Bayesian statistics.
- Excellent English and communication skills.
- Experience in designing and implementing algorithms, ideally related to optimization and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques.
Desirable Experience
- Experience in developing and deploying software in academic or industry settings.
- Experience in high-throughput sequencing data analysis, preferably using compute clusters or cloud computing.
Application Procedure:
Please submit your cover letter, CV, and contact details for three references with your application on the University of Surrey website here.
For informal inquiries, you can contact Dr. Bingxin Lu at [email protected].
