Fred Hoffman
Interests
I'm interested in the use of mathematics, statistical inference and computation to solve important scientific and technological problems. I'm therefore interested in all of the technology of modelling and inference and the associated mathematical and computational challenges. Also I'm interested in the use of visualisation to solve problems and communicate ideas.
Research:
- 10 week project. In collaboration with a computational biologist and an experimentalist at UCB, my academic supervisor Charlotte Deane and I in the Proteomics Group (Oxford Department of Statistics) investigated the use of data-mining methods (multilevel clustering) to find disease markers associated with auto-immune disease in big-data (protein-protein interaction networks).
- DPhil. In collaboration with computational biologists at Astrazeneca (Alderley Park) and immunologists at MedImmune (Cambridge) my academic supervisors Helen Byrne, David Gavaghan and James Osborne and I in the Computational Biology Group (Oxford Computer Science Department) are developing mathematical models to aid the development of antibody cancer therapies. Antibodies are now engineered that bind to targets (receptors) on tumour cells and incite immune cells to kill them. Such immunotherapies now routinely treat previously untreatable cancers and are under intense development. The aim of our modelling work is to quantify the impact of antibody design on therapeutic efficacy (tumour cell killing) and to use mathematics and computation to suggest optimisations.
Biography
I have a BSc in Mathematics and Statistics from the University of Nottingham and an MSc in Computational and Mathematical Finance from the University of Oxford. I'm a member of New College, Oxford.