The Blog Swan

An email from an old colleague has just dropped in the inbox.  There’s a position going at my old place of work, in fact it’s my old job!  3 previous occupants – all of whom are still sane!  Seriously it was a great position, with a great group with lots of exciting things to get involved in.

Application forms etc. are here

Reposted from Philip Lord’s blog ‘An Exercise in Irrelevance‘

PhD Studentship, 2010

EPSRC PhD Studentship Building a logical model of biology: the Ontology of Mitochondria

For this project, you will use cutting edge technology designed for the Semantic Web, and apply it to the new field of systems biology. Specifically, you will develop an OWL ontology, a formal, logically specified model, to describe the mitochondria, a subsystem of the cell. You will use this to integrate large amounts of real-world data, to search for inconsistencies and produce a predictions about the underlying biology. From a computing perspective, this will result in insights both about the technology, and its scalablity; from a systems biology perspective, you gain understanding of the value of models which are wider than traditional mathematical models; from a biomedical perspective, you may gain insight in the functioning and behaviour of a medically important system of the cell.

This is a challenging multi-disciplinary project; applicants are not expected to understand all its aspects at the outset; as a result, it is of interest to those from either a computing science, computational biology or bioinformatics background. Any experience of ontologies, modelling or mitochondrial biology will be an advantage, but is not required. A willingness to learn is critical; students will spend significant time in both a computing science and biology environment, and will become familiar with both.

You should have either a First or 2.1 in Computing Science, a Biological Science or Mathematics, and a distinction level Masters degree in a related subject. Equivalent experience will also be considered.

Depending on how you meet the EPSRC’s eligibility criteria, you may be entitled to a full or a partial award. A full award covers tuition fees at the UK/EU rate and an annual stipend of £13,290 (2009/10). A partial award covers fees at the UK/EU rate only.

For further details, please contact Phillip Lord
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So I’ve added a new blog from Hugo Hiden to the blogroll links. Hugo is the technical director of the North Eastern Regional e-Science centre (http://www.neresc.ac.uk), which is based in Newcastle University. We interact quite a bit whether it’s due to the CARMEN project or our Campus Grid or because of the fact we’re both sort of (but not quite) in the Computer Science department, but spend lots of our time there.

Hugo is one of the people (and there are many) who don’t subscribe to the philosophy that Open Source is necessarily best. Filling the shoes of the previous technical director (Savas Parastatidis, now at Microsoft) maybe this is unsurprising, but I think the blog will be extremely interesting if you’re wondering how things might be done in a parallel universe outside your OSS microcosm :)

The original ‘heads up’ on this exciting development came of course from Frank who is always there at the bleeding edge of anything ending in 2.0.

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