| James Barrett |
| Tue 23 Apr 2019, 11:00 - 12:00 |
| IF 4.31/4.33 |
If you have a question about this talk, please contact: Gareth Beedham (gbeedham)
Title: Epigenetic heterogeneity and complexity in cancer.
Epigenetic modifications change the way DNA is used without changing the underlying DNA sequence. Epigenetics plays an important role in regulating gene function and disruption to the epigenome is a common feature of cancer. Epigenetic patterns observed in DNA sequencing data from tumours present an opportunity to infer the evolutionary history of the tumour. Furthermore, higher levels of epigenetic heterogeneity have been linked to poorer clinical outcomes. In this talk I will discuss statistical methods for quantifying epigenetic heterogeneity and phylogenetic inference. Epigenetic heterogeneity also presents a challenge to the development of diagnostic or predictive epigenetic signatures, and I will discuss some recent work on training classifiers from highly heterogeneous epigenetic profiles.
Short Bio.
James Barrett is a bioinformatician at the UCL Institute for Women's Health at University College London. He also has a part-time position at the School of Cancer at King's College London. His work focuses on epigenetics, cancer imaging, and the development of statistical and computational tools for analysing large-scale biomedical datasets. His background is in mathematics and he obtained his PhD in machine learning from King's College London in 2014.