William Valdar: background and previous work

Academic Projects (click in table below for details)

Date	Place	Degree
2002-2003	Oxford University	MSc Applied Statistics
1997-2001	University College London	PhD Protein Structure Bioinformatics
1996-1997	Manchester University	MSc Bioinformatics
1993-1996	Manchester University	BSc Biochemistry

Work Projects

Academic projects

MSc Applied Statistics

2002-2003

Oxford University

Thesis: "Detection of epistatic quantitative trait loci in murine heterogeneous stock recombinant inbred lines"
Supervisors: Prof Francis Marriott (Statistics Department), Dr Richard Mott (WTCHG)
Tutors: Prof Bob Griffiths (Michaelmas Term), Dr Maria de Iorio (Hilary Term), Prof Brian Ripley (Trinity Term).
College: Linacre College, Oxford

Courses attended: advanced social statistics; applied probability; bayesian statistics; clinical trials; combinatorial optimization; computer-intensive and robust statistics; design and analysis of experiments; expert systems and bayesian belief networks; generalized linear models; linear models; mathematical genetics; multivariate analysis; observational studies; pattern recognition; simulation; spatial data analysis; statistical theory; survey methods; survival analysis; time series.

PhD Protein Structure Bioinformatics

1997-2001

University College London

Thesis: "Residue conservation in the prediction of protein-protein interfaces"
Supervisor: Prof Janet Thornton FRS CBE

Description: I investigated the usefulness of evolutionary information for identifying protein-protein interaction sites. See my publications for relevant papers and slide shows. Also see my software page for bioinformatics tools I developed during my doctorate.My thesis is available online from my publications page.

MSc Bioinformatics 1996-1997 Manchester University

Thesis: "J-Features: development of a Java-based feature table editor "
Supervisor: Dr Charlie Hodgman (GlaxoSmithKline )

Other projects: "Monte Carlo simulation of protein folding on a cubic lattice " (miniproject); "Prediction of domain boundaries from amino acid sequence " (miniproject). Group project: "Virtual PCR", a web-based resource that enumerated all fragments expected when PCRing the E.coli or yeast genome given some user-defined primer sequences.

Notes: I did my final project at GlaxoWellcome (now GSK), designing and implementing a Java applet to edit SwissProt feature tables. The applet is called J-Features, for "Java Feature table editor". It was written in good old Java 1.02 and ran perfectly on everything it was supposed to run on. Although it doesn't have anything as fancy as online help, you are welcome to view my thesis (see publications ), which describes the program and its use in some detail and even includes source code (in case you want to laugh yourself senseless). SwissProt files may have changed since I wrote J-Features, so here's a sample SwissProt entry for which the applet should work.

BSc Biochemistry 1993-1996 Manchester University

Final Year Project: "Alternative splicing of collagen VI".

Notes: This project was in a wet lab and involved primer design, PCR, numerous gels and DNA sequencing.

Before then I was at Fortismere School in London, where Nick Hornby's "Fever Pitch" was filmed.

Work experience

I have worked on short contracts for University College London , Inpharmatica , GlaxoSmithKline and The Royal Society . I am currently a post-doctoral researcher in bioinformatics at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at Oxford University .