Dr Alasdair Philip Droop

Title

CR UK Bioinformatics Research Fellow

Email

a.p.droop@leeds.ac.uk

Address

Leeds Institute of Molecular Medicine

Wellcome Trust Brenner Building

St James’s University Hospital

Leeds

LS9 9TF

BHRC Role

Bioinformatics Technology Group member

Research Interests

 

• Microarray bioinformatics
• data visualisation
• computational biology
• simulation

About

 

Education:

PhD (University of York) “Correlation Analysis of Multivariate Biological Data”; MRes bioinformatics (York) distinction; BSc honours in molecular Biology (Edinburgh) 2.i

2009-2011: Research Associate in York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis, University of York

My current projects allow me to work in close collaboration with experimentalists to perform data mining on gene expression data to elucidate the effects of drug resistance on bladder cancer cells. This work aims to generate genetic “profiles” that will allow us to predict the response of a novel cancer sample to chemotherapeutic agents.

My research interests include the application of systems-biology approaches to the study of cancer neogenesis, with particular focus on studying cancer as an emergent property of a population of cells, rather than an innate property of an individual cell.

I have extensive experience working with microarray data, involving data mining and visualisation. I am interested in the development of suitable background significance models for correlation-based data analysis from microarray datasets.

I have diverse interests throughout the field of Artificial life, working on the application of Small-World network topologies to artificial mutation systems.

Collaboration

 

• York Centre for Complex Systems Analysis, The University of York

• YCR Cancer Research Unit, The Department of Biology, The University of York

•  

• Department of Anthropology, The University of Durham

Grants Awarded

 

YCCSA: The TRANSIT interdisciplinary seminar series

12/2010 – 10/2011

£4,890 (York Digital Library)

This project processed and collated multimedia data recorded during the TRANSIT seminar series (held in YCCSA) into a cohesive set of online videos for educational use. This project involved close collaboration between YCCSA and the York Digital Library to define a suitable format for the archival and dissemination of digital information, including data from high-throughput experimentation.

 

AlKan: Prostate Cancer Modelling feasibility study

10/2010 – 03/2011

£13,939 (TRANSIT project feasibility grant)

This project used the CoSMoS iterative modelling framework to bring domain experts and modellers together over a period of four months to create and refine Petri net based models (and the tools necessary to run and visualise them) of cell population differentiation in prostate tissue. This project was proposed and headed by me.

Large-scale analysis of multiple microarray datasets to identify correlated gene expression patterns in human cancer

09/2009 – 10/2010£44,390 (YCR Pump priming award)

We used an unbiased bioinformatic approach to integrate data from 726 individual experiments from the ArrayExpress database; yielding a combined dataset of 24,029 microarrays. RMA processing was performed upon the data so as to allow the direct comparison of the separate experiments to each other. This dataset is being used to inform and direct biological experimentation into prostate cancer in the York Cancer Research Unit.