The MRC Biostatistics Unit is pleased to announce that Sach Mukherjee, Programme Leader, has been appointed as a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit Award holder for his work on Statistics and machine learning for precision medicine.

The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of science, has announced the appointment of 28 new holders. The newly appointed award holders are working on a wide range of projects.

Jointly funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS), the scheme aims to provide universities with additional support to enable them to attract science talent from overseas and retain respected UK scientists of outstanding achievement and potential.

Sach Mukherjee, speaking about his research work at the BSU:

“The overarching goal of our research programme is the development and application of statistical and machine learning approaches that can exploit molecular and genomic data to assist in directing therapies to patients likely to benefit.

Recent biotechnological advances (including sequencing and proteomics) offer unprecedented opportunities to transform the clinical management of many diseases by taking into account patient-specific molecular characteristics in addition to classical clinical features (“precision medicine”). Ongoing work at many institutions, including world-leading efforts underway at Cambridge, is laying the groundwork for precision medicine in fields including biotechnology, medical informatics, ethics and clinical medicine itself. Our efforts address statistical and machine learning questions that are central to precision medicine, including issues that arise due to disease heterogeneity, high-dimensionality, and the complexity of underlying biochemical mechanisms.

Machine learning (ML) is a field that combines ideas from computer science, mathematics and statistics to find patterns in data. Our research explores how we can combine the power of machine learning and computational statistics on the one hand, with large biological datasets on the other, to better understand human diseases, including cancer, and start to develop predictive tools that can, in the longer term, give doctors information to help in matching therapies to patients. To this end, we work on both biomedical questions, in close collaboration with experimental teams in the UK, US and Europe, as well as methodological research in statistics and machine learning motivated by such questions.”

About the Royal Society

The Royal Society is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine. The Society’s fundamental purpose, as it has been since its foundation in 1660, is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. For further information on the Royal Society, visit their website https://royalsociety.org/

About the Wolfson Foundation

The Wolfson Foundation is a grant-making charity established in 1955. Funding is given to support excellence. More information is available from http://www.wolfson.org.uk/