Paweł Widera

photo

School of Computing
Newcastle University
1 Science Square
Newcastle, NE4 5TG, UK

Office: 5.014
E-mail: name.surname@ncl.ac.uk
GPG key: 4096R/BBCFE170

Lecturer
PhD - Univerisity of Nottingham, UK
MSc, BSc - Poznań University of Technology, Poland
Research Interests
bioinformatics, evolutionary algorithms, heuristics and metaheuristics, interactive data visualisation, machine learning
An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
Niels Bohr
You don't use science to show that you are right, you use science to become right. Randall Munroe
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Research

My adventure with bioinformatics started during my B.Sc. project at Poznań University of Technology. In a team with my three colleagues I implemented a distributed version of exact (B&B) and approximated (greedy heuristic) algorithms solving the DNA sequence assembly problem.

I continued to work on this subject with a new team, trying to improve the heuristic approach. The algorithm we developed was used to analyse and verify the genome of SARS virus. This research became a foundation of my first publications and my M.Sc. thesis on metaheuristic approach to the DNA assembly.

In the last year of my studies, I started working as a programmer / system analyst at PSNC. For a few years I was a part of a team working on e-government services.

Then I moved to UK, to start Ph.D. studies at the University of Nottingham funded by Marie Curie EST programme (thanks!). The main topics of my research were optimisation aspects of protein structure comparison (PSC) and protein structure prediction (PSP). After years of great struggle I defended a thesis on GP-based automated design of energy functions for the PSP problem.

Since then I was working on several problems in protein structure comparison (consensus methods in protein classification, distributed multi-measure comparison using the PaaS paradigm). I have also continued to work on the evolutionary-based optimisation of energy functions, this time applied to the protein models structural refinement.

Recently I started to explore the area of topological analysis and interactive graph data visualisation in the context of biological networks. Oh, and I moved to a different university too.

If you really, really interested in my scientific adventures, the list of my readings might tell you more...