Kieran Alden

I am currently completing a PhD at the University of York, split between the Centre for Immunology & Infection (CII) and the Department of Computer Science (CS).

This is jointly supervised by Dr Mark Coles (CII) and Professor Jon Timmis (CS/Electronics). The aim of this study is to further our understanding of how the immune system develops by using computer simulation. We now understand a great deal about our immune system, but there are lots of questions which remain unanswered. Although we would like to perform experiments to answer them all, lab experiments can be expensive, difficult to perform, and may require the use of animals to achieve an accurate and reliable result.

By creating simulations of how our immune system develops, we can perform some of these experiments on the computer rather than in the laboratory. This should save on cost, allow scientists to perform experiments which may be hard or impossible to do in a lab, and help with the governments strategy to reduce or remove the number of animals used in research. We hope our work will show that computer simulations can be built which correctly imitate how sections of our immune system develop, and can help us understand more about how this happens.

More detail can be seen on the Research page. This study is jointly funded by the BBSRC and EPSRC

In collaboration with Professor Bourne’s laboratory at UCSD, I am also involved in the development of dConsensus, a tool useful for biologists concerned with identification of structural domains within proteins. For more detail, see the dConsensus page