Dr Yuanwei Xu

Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences
Research Fellow

Contact details

Email: y.xu@bham.ac.uk

Address: Centre for Health Data Science
IOEM Building
Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences
University 麻豆精选
Edgbaston
Birmingham
B15 2TT
UK

Dr Xu is a Research Fellow (Statistical Computing) in the Centre for Health Data Science, Department of Cancer and Genomic Sciences. He is currently involved in the EU-funded Hypermarker () project, as a core contributor to data analytics and machine learning. The project aims to develop an AI-based clinical decision support tool to better predict anti-hypertensive drug response for individual patients. Dr Xu also contributed to the Smart Triage project (), as a Data Scientist, developing ML-based triage tools in major incident settings for risk stratification of trauma patients.

Qualifications

PhD in Scientific Computing, University of Warwick, 2016
MSc in Financial Mathematics and Computation, University of Leicester, 2011

Biography

After obtaining his Master’s degree in Financial Mathematics, Dr Yuanwei Xu decided to pursue research in computational science. His PhD was in Scientific Computing, working in the area of computational chemistry and biophysics. Specifically, he studied molecular simulation methods and was focused on developing novel Monte Carlo methods for efficient conformational sampling in complex energy landscape, with application in lattice-protein aggregation.Later, Dr Xu joined as a Research Associate in the Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare, Imperial College London, working on genomic-based transmission inference in molecular epidemiology. In particular, his research involved development and application of Bayesian methods for outbreak reconstruction from pathogen genomes and epidemiological data. He joined Birmingham in 2020 and has been involved in several research projects.

Postgraduate supervision

MSc Health Data Science Student Projects

Research

Dr Xu’s primary research interest lies in computational systems biology and health data science, in particular, developing computational approaches and mathematical tools to understand complex systems in life science, uncover hidden patterns in biological data and networks, and ultimately identify disease biomarkers that lead to changes in strategy to improve human health.

He is particularly interested in statistical and computational approaches to multi-omics integration and developing machine learning approaches to better understand the intricate interplay between human microbiome and diseases.

Publications

Recent publications

Article

Wang, J, Zhang, J, Pu, L, Qi, W, Xu, Y, Wan, K, Zhu, Y, Gkoutos, GV, Han, Y & Chen, Y 2024, '', JACC: Asia.

Xu, Y, Malik, N, Chernbumroong, S, Vassallo, J, Keene, D, Foster, M, Lord, J, Belli, A, Hodgetts, T, Bowley, D & Gkoutos, G 2023, '', Emergency Medicine Journal.

Xu, Y, Nash, K, Acharjee, A & Gkoutos, GV 2022, '', Bioinformatics, vol. 38, no. 6, btab879, pp. 1639-1647.

Wang, J, Li, Y, Yang, F, Bravo, L, Wan, K, Xu, Y, Cheng, W, Sun, J, Zhu, Y, Zhu, T, Gkoutos, GV, Han, Y & Chen, Y 2021, '', Radiology, vol. 298, no. 1, pp. 71-79.

Bisht, V, Nash, K, Xu, Y, Agarwal, P, Bosch, S, Gkoutos, GV & Acharjee, A 2021, '', International Journal of Molecular Sciences, vol. 22, no. 11, 5763.

Malik, NS, Chernbumroong, S, Xu, Y, Vassallo, J, Lee, J, Moran, CG, Newton, T, Arul, GS, Lord, JM, Belli, A, Keene, D, Foster, M, Hodgetts, T, Bowley, DM & Gkoutos, GV 2021, '', EClinicalMedicine, vol. 40, 101100.

Malik, NS, Chernbumroong, S, Xu, Y, Vassallo, J, Lee, J, Bowley, DM, Hodgetts, T, Moran, CG, Lord, JM, Belli, A, Keene, D, Foster, M & Gkoutos, GV 2021, '', EClinicalMedicine, vol. 36, 100888.

Acharjee, A, Larkman, J, Xu, Y, Cardoso, VR & Gkoutos, GV 2020, '', BMC Medical Genomics, vol. 13, no. 1, 178.