Talk by Dr Hisham Al-Assam at St Paul’s Catholic School

Dr Hisham Al-Assam was invited to give a talk at St Paul’s Catholic School, Milton Keynes, on 22 January 2015, as part of their Public Understanding of Science lectures.

In his talk, “Computer Science in Medical and Biomedical Research”, Dr Al-Assam presented real examples based on some of the latest research projects being conducted at the Department of Applied Computing. The presented projects address a number of interesting questions such as: can we develop automated algorithms to identify some diseases at very early stages and if so, how can we employ them in practice in a form of a decision support system? The talk also showed how state-of-art computing techniques can be utilised to conduct an effective high-throughput analysis on the huge volumes of biological data in order to identify the genetic basis of complex diseases.

The talk was attended by an audience with a very broad background ranging from pupils who will be studying science at  GCSE and A-level to professional scientists.