Timothy Ebbels

Join Professor Timothy Ebbels, online or in person, for his Imperial Inaugural.

We have limited in-person spaces available so please ensure you register in advance via Eventbrite.

Please feel free to join us online

Link: bit.ly/YT-TimEbbels

Abstract

Metabolites are the molecules in your body that generate the energy to keep you alive, as well as the raw materials to build crucial components like DNA. So, it’s no surprise that they are important in maintaining your health, and that changes in their levels can reveal much about what goes wrong in disease. There is a vast range of different metabolites and modern “metabolomics” lab analysis can yield the levels of 1000s of metabolites in a single blood sample. Advanced statistical and machine learning algorithms are needed to make sense of the resulting flood of complex but information rich data.

For the last 25 years, Professor Tim Ebbels has worked to extract more useful information from metabolomics measurements. From early work devising an “expert system” for drug toxicity assessment, through projects in environmental toxicity and molecular epidemiology, his team have been instrumental in developing some of the major tools used in modern metabolic science. In this lecture he will tell the story of this journey, crossing disciplines from physics to the exciting modern world of data rich biology. A key theme will be how the unique confluence of AI and high-throughput molecular measurements is enabling new discoveries in a variety of biological and biomedical problems.

Biography

Tim Ebbels is Professor of Biomedical Data Science and Head of Bioinformatics in the Department of Metabolism, Digestion and Reproduction at Imperial College London. He obtained his PhD in astrophysics from the University of Cambridge and in 1998 moved into bioinformatics. His group focuses on the application of bioinformatic, machine learning and chemometric techniques to post-genomic data, with a particular emphasis on computational metabolomics. He has worked on projects ranging from environmental monitoring, through molecular epidemiology, to toxicogenomics and his research addresses problems of data integration, visualisation, network analysis, time series and metabolite annotation. Tim is an active member of the metabolomics community, having served as a Director of the international Metabolomics Society from 2012-2018, co-organised international their conferences and is a co-founder of the London Metabolomics Network. He is an editorial board member for BMC Bioinformatics and the Journal of Chemometrics. He has a strong commitment to postgraduate education, serving as Director of the MRes in Biomedical Research at Imperial College (~900 students trained) and leading the Data Analysis short course at the Imperial’s International Phenome Training Centre. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry and Lifetime Honorary Fellow of the Metabolomics Society.

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