Our research is in two distinct areas: immunoinformatics and biomedical text mining. Currently we are focusing on the following projects:
- Analyzing the antigenicity of epidemic influenza A
- Predicting immune responses to therapeutic factor VIII used in the treatment of haemophilia A
- Reducing the immunogenicity of adeno-associated virus, a vector for gene therapy
- Developing text mining methods to support the construction of microbial metabolic pathways
- Dr Keith Gomez (Consultant in Haemostasis, Royal Free/UCL Medical School)
- Dr Anita Grigoriadis (Research Fellow, Breakthrough Breast Cancer Research Unit, King's College London)
- Dr Dan Hart (Consultant in Haemostasis, Barts/Queen Mary)
- Dr John McCauley (Director of the WHO Influenza Centre, NIMR)
- Dr Amit Nathwani (Reader in Haemostasis, UCL Cancer Institute)
- Adrian M Smith MSc (Bioinformatician, Unilever).
We would like to thank the following organisations for supporting our research:
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC)
- Medical Research Council (MRC)
- European Union
- AstraZeneca
- Unilever
We are keen to recruit highly motivated and talented people to work in our group, ranging from undergraduate to post-doctoral level. All interested individuals are encouraged to email Dr Shepherd (a.shepherd@mail.cryst.bbk.ac.uk), but please bear in mind the following points:
Funding. The group has no earmarked funding available unless it is clearly advertised on this page. PhD studentships are available at specific times of the year through the ISMB PhD Programmes. Applications must be made via that website, but feel free to get in touch informally if you wish to discuss possible projects. The same advice applies to internships, for which support is available through the ISMB Summer Internship Programme. For those who are unable to get funding, it is worth noting that Birkbeck specializes in part-time education for people in work, including at PhD level.
Skills. All our work is computational. We welcome applications from from people with good programming skills (in any language) and/or specialist knowledge about the human immune system. We are also interested in pursuing one line of research for which significant expertise in homology modelling would be a distinct advantage.
