Theoretical Systems Biology

I am a PhD student in the Theoretical Systems Biology group at Imperial College London, supervised by John Pinney and co-supervised by Michael Stumpf. I obtained my undergraduate degree in Mathematics and a Masters degree in bioinformatics at the Sciences faculty of Porto University in Portugal. In my masters thesis I demonstrated the ability of logic programming to elegantly model, query and mine spatial databases.

Afterwards I was accepted in a PhD Program in Computational Biology at Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência (IGC) in Portugal. In the first year of this PhD program I was given an intense and extensive overview of what is being done in this field. After this, I had the opportunity to choose a Lab where to develop my thesis research work. I decided to work with John Pinney and Michael Stumpf on evolution of metabolic networks.

In my PhD I am working on probabilistic modeling of metabolic network evolution. In order to understand biological systems we need to organize the wealth of interaction data into mathematical network models. These networks describe the sum of metabolic, physical and regulatory interactions in an organism. In this project we will develop tools that infer such networks building on novel statistical and bioinformatics tools. We will focus on metabolic networks of pathogenic organisms, in particular Plasmodium falciparum. We will use these inferred networks to perform detailed evolutionary analyses in order to understand the evolutionary processes involved in host-pathogen interaction.