Dr Andrew Dalby

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Senior Lecturer in Biostatistics and Research Methods

Life Sciences

(United Kingdom) +44 20 7911 5000 ext 64150
115 New Cavendish Street
London
GB
W1W 6UW
Tuesday 11am-1pm
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About me

I originally studied Chemistry and Law at the University of Exeter and went on to do a PhD in molecular modelling of biomolecules also at Exeter. After finishing my PhD I became the post-doc. working in protein crystallography and the emerging field of bioinformatics. 

I helped start the MSc in Bioinformatics at Exeter and I taught there for 5 years until I moved to the University of Oxford to help run their Bioinformatics MSc, which I also did for 5 years. At Oxford Bioinformatics falls under the remit of Statistics and so I had to develop my statistics skills and since then I have become much more of a Biostatistician. I also received my Diploma in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education from the University of Oxford.

I have continued to develop my skills in statistics  and teaching. I am a member of the Royal Statistical Society and a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Teaching

I have taught across the complete spectrum of courses within Bioinformatics. As my background was in sequence and structure analysis this was my starting point for teaching but I have also taught Perl programming, microarrays, Linux computing, proteomics, statistics and statistical data-mining.

I have taught introductory courses using R and SPSS for statistical analysis.

I currently teach on the Levels 5 and 7 Research Methods Modules the Level 6 project module and the Level 5 Bioinformatics Modules, I also supervise MSc and Undergraduate Projects.

I am the module leader for the level 5 Research Methods and Bioinformatics modules..

I am very interested in online and blended learning as some of the modules at Oxford were taught online. I am also interested in the idea of Gamification and using simulations and real problems as a basis for teaching.

Research

Current Research

I am currently working of a wide range of projects:

  • The evolution of and phylo-geography of Influenza
  • The use of word based methods to detect novel miRNAs
  • The evolution of fructose 1,6-bisphosphate aldolase
  • Modeling protein unfolding using molecular mechanics
  • COPASAAR II (simple amino acid repeat database)
  • Microbiome analysis (in collaboration with S. Moschos)
  • Reproducability in Bioinformatics Analysis

Research Projects

I work on applying computational modeling and analysis techniques to large-scale biological datasets. The aim is to incorporate many different levels of biological data to build better models, and improve our understanding.

Students will develop their analytical, statistical and computational skills and show that they can work with "Big Data". Visualisation and presentation is an important part of any project where there are large amounts of data and these are essential skills for a wide range of employers. Possible project areas are:

  • Influenza
  • Protein misfolding diseases
  • Sequence patterns in proteomes
  • Reproducibility of bioinformatics analysis in cancer

Publications

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.