A recent publication in Cell, leading by Prof. Jianfeng Feng, presents a comprehensive atlas of proteome-phenome associations (https://proteome-phenome-atlas.com/Link opens in a new window) by systematically mapping 2,920 plasma proteins to the presence and onset of 720 diseases and 986 health-related traits in 53,026 individuals. This atlas provides insights into shared and characteristic biological mechanisms among diseases. The proteomic profiles, coupled with machine learning, identify useful biomarkers and prediction models for multiple health conditions simultaneously. Through integrating protein quantitative trait locus (pQTL) data, this work also illustrates the use of the atlas for causal protein discovery and further drug target prioritization. The proteome-phenome atlas furnishes an extensive resource supporting future research in screening, diagnosis, and treatment of human diseases and advancing precision medicine.

See here https://statsupai.org/quarto_web/site/posts/S11_interview.html for a more detailed discussion on the article.

We are happy to announce that an academic from our department, Dr Sayan Bhattacharya, is among the winners of ERC Consolidator Grants 2024. According to the European Research Council: "These grants, totalling €678 million, aim to support outstanding scientists and scholars as they establish their independent research teams and develop their most promising scientific ideas. The funding is provided through the EU's Horizon Europe programme."

Sayan Bhattacharya has been awarded a €2million ERC Consolidator grant for a 5-year project entitled "Towards a Dynamic Algorithms Centric Theory of Linear Programming" (DYNALP). The project aims to build a new theory exploring the interplay between two key concepts, Linear Programming and Dynamic Algorithms, which, in turn, will pave the way towards attacking outstanding open questions in the field of Theoretical Computer Science.

In the 2024 round, this was the only project from the United Kingdom that was awarded an ERC Consolidator Grant in Computer Science and Informatics (PE6 panel). The press release contains more information about the ERC funding programme.

We are delighted to announce that Martin Costa, a PhD student at the Theory and Foundations research division, has received a highly competitive Google PhD Fellowship for his work on designing clustering algorithms for dynamic datasets. The Fellowship comes in the form of an unrestricted gift from Google, of 60,000 USD per year, for up to two years. Under the category of "Algorithms and Theory", besides Martin only two other PhD students in Europe (from University of Cambridge and ETH Zurich) received a Google PhD Fellowship this year. Many congratulations to Martin for this achievement!