Current Programme Directors

Professor Chris Ponting

Prof Chris Ponting is a Professor of Medical Bioinformatics at the University of Edinburgh, and the Director of Data Innovation at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer.

Prof Ponting leads the XDF Programme. He was trained first in particle physics before pursuing a successful career in biomedicine, so knows first-hand the skills necessary for Fellows to transition into “Big Data Biomedicine”. He was Chair of the MRC Bioinformatics Training Panel, Founding Director of the MRC CGAT Training Centre, and jointly led the ELIXIR European Training Platform. His research is in computational and experimental genomics, specifically on the molecular and genetic mechanisms of disease, and he has recruited individuals with diverse backgrounds, from physics and computer science, to biology and biochemistry, to his research group.

Chris Ponting Group website

Professor Davide Marenduzzo

Prof. Davide Marenduzzo is a Professor of Computational Biophysics at the University of Edinburgh, within the School of Physics and Astronomy.

He was first trained as a particle physicist, then did his PhD and post-doctoral training in biophysics and soft matter, so that he has followed a similar pathway to that of an XDF in his early career. His current research deals mainly with models for 3D chromosome organisation and for chromatin transcription, in close collaborations with experimentalists in biology and medicine. Among other things, he is well known for discovering together with his team the bridging-induced attraction, a biophysical mechanism leading to the spontaneous formation of clusters of proteins associated with transcription in living cells.

Dr Diego Oyarzún

Dr Diego Oyarzún is a Reader in Computational Biology at the University of Edinburgh. He holds a joint appointment at the School of Informatics and School of Biological Sciences.

Dr Oyarzún has a background in systems and control theory. His team develops computational methods for studying molecular systems in biomedicine and biotechnology. He has authored over 70 research papers in systems & synthetic biology, applied mathematics and control theory. He is member of the executive board of the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Biomedical AI, co-Director of the Edinburgh Science for Sustainability Hub and has had roles with various international bodies (WEF, G20). He is an associate editor for journals in biotechnology and synthetic biology, and has participated in programme committees for several international conferences. Dr Oyarzún is Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute and the Royal Society of Biology.

Diego Oyarzún Group website

Diego Oyarzún Personal website

Dr Catalina Vallejos

Dr Catalina Vallejos is a Reader at the MRC Human Genetics Unit.

Dr Catalina Vallejos is a Bayesian statistician and leads the Biomedical Data Science research group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit within the University of Edinburgh. She is also a Fellow of The Alan Turing Institute. Her research group focuses on the development, implementation and application of Bayesian statistical methodology that is motivated by the multiple sources of heterogeneity that are typically encountered in complex biomedical data: from technical noise to population structure and different data modalities. Catalina’s research involves various types of complex biomedical data from single cell sequencing to electronic health records.

Catalina Vallejos Group website

Dr Duncan Sproul

Dr Duncan Sproul is a programme leader at the MRC Human Genetics Unit and Institute of Genetics and Cancer.

Duncan started as a geneticist who was frustrated by the fact he was not allowed to combine physics and biology for his undergraduate degree. Following his degree in Genetics at the University of Edinburgh, he was awarded an MRC pre-doctoral fellowship to undertake a PhD on the regulation of gene clusters with Professor Wendy Bickmore at the MRC Human Genetics Unit. During his postdoctoral training at the Edinburgh Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit with Dr Andrew Sims, Duncan applied emerging epigenomic technologies to understand the role of epigenetic dysfunction in breast carcinogenesis. He joined the MRC Human Genetics Unit in 2013 as a research fellow and was awarded a Career Development Fellowship from CRUK in 2016. He is also an alumnus of the Scottish Crucible interdisciplinary training program.

Duncan Sproul Group website

Dr Robert Kitchen

Dr Robert Kitchen leads a global computational biology team at Novo Nordisk.

The department focuses on applying systems biology and machine learning to identify drug target candidates from high-throughput in-vitro functional screening and unveiling endotypes of cardiometabolic diseases.  Prior to joining Novo Nordisk’s research centre in Oxford, UK, Robert was a Principal Investigator in the cardiology research faculty at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.  There, his laboratory specialised in applying machine learning methods to model neurological and cardiovascular disorders and has substantial experience in working with transcriptomics and with multi-omics data integration.  Prior to his academic appointment, he led biomarker development and companion-diagnostics programs at Exosome Diagnostics (now part of Bio-Techne). Robert holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, UK, and undertook his post-doctoral training in the Gerstein and Nairn labs at Yale University, USA, focussing on systems biology, functional genomics, and molecular psychiatry.

Dr Xiao Fu

Dr Xiao Fu is a Junior Group Leader at the CRUK Scotland Institute.

Dr Xiao Fu leads the Integrative Modelling Lab at the CRUK Scotland Institute. His research team focuses on developing computational approaches to investigate organisational principles of the tumour microenvironment and mechanisms of therapy resistance, in collaboration with research groups with expertise in pre-clinical in vivo experiments, advanced imaging, and patient data analysis. He studied biophysics during his PhD training and developed multi-scale agent-based models to study disease progression in liver toxicity and in diabetic retinopathy. During his Postdoctoral research, his work spanned agent-based models to study the evolutionary dynamics of tumours and spatial data analysis to study architectural features of the tumour microenvironment, in collaboration with cancer cell biologists, experimentalists, clinicians, and data scientists.