I joined Oxford’s Population Health Department and the Big Data Institute as a PhD Candidate in October 2021. The aims of my PhD project and related projects were to assess the possible causal relations between body composition traits and a wide range of diseases and to identify potential novel drug targets for fat mass.
To do this, I imputed the body composition traits when needed and selected a subset of 3K proteins using machine learning methods, performed and used results of genome-wide analyses of body composition and proteins, and employed Mendelian randomisation and related methods to assess the causal relevance of body composition to diseases and of proteins to fat mass. My PhD is supported by Oxford Population Health and the Ad Futura Foundation.
Starting late this year, I will begin work in multi-omics and machine learning as part of HDR UK’s Molecules to Health Records driver programme, working with the Mexico City Prospective Study at the Population Health Department of the University of Oxford and as visiting researcher at the Inouye Group at the Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit of the University of Cambridge.
Before my PhD, I worked as a data scientist at IBM’s Chief Analytics Office in New York, as a researcher at an IBM-MIT AI Lab group studying the opioid epidemic in the USA, and as a co-lead of a Data Science for Social Good project focused on improving MMR Vaccination rates in Croatia.
In addition to my PhD, I have contributed to other research projects, including a non-inferiority pragmatic trial of smoking cessation therapies (with teams at MGH – Harvard Medical School, the Andrija Štampar School of Public Health of the University of Zagreb, and the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Ljubljana), a project on attitudes towards vaccines and public health interventions (with a team at LSE Health Policy), as well a project assessing the re-purposing potential of GLP1R agonists for alcohol use disorders. I received my MSc in data science from Columbia University and my BAs in economics and philosophy from Brown University.
Project Information
Research Driver Programme: Molecules to Health Records