Thorsten Forster
Thorsten Forster is a data science researcher at the University of Edinburgh. With a background in statistics and computer science he has obtained his PhD in biomedical sciences, and has over 10 years of experience in this interdisciplinary research. Researching statistical and machine learning rooted data analysis approaches to biomedical big data (microarrays, next generation sequencing), he has been project manager on the SPRINT project, which is targeted at allowing lay users to make use of parallelised analysis solutions for large biological data sets within the R statistical programming language. He is also a co-founder of Fios Genomics Ltd, a university spin out company providing data analytical services for biomedical big data research. Current work includes devising a gene transcription classifier for the diagnosis of bacterial infections in newborn babies, transcriptional profiling of interferon gamma activation of macrophages, investigation of the role of cholesterol in immune responses to infections, and the investigation of genomic factors that cause childhood wheezing to progress to asthma. A complete profile is available here: http://tinyurl.com/ThorstenForster-UEDIN Terence Sloan (Terry) is a Software Development Group Manager at EPCC, the University of Edinburgh’s High Performance Computing Centre. He has 25+ years experience managing and participating in Data Science and HPC projects with Scottish SMEs, UK corporations, European and global collaborations. Terry, was the Co-Principal Investigator on the Wellcome Trust (Award no. 086696/Z/08/Z), BBSRC (Award no. BB/J019283/1) and three EPSRC distributed Computational Science awards that have helped develop the SPRINT package for R. He has also held awards from the ESRC (Award nos. RES-189-25-0066, RES-149-25-0005) that investigated the use of operational big data for customer behaviour analysis. Terry is the coordinator for the Data Analytics with HPC, Project Preparation and Dissertation courses on the University of Edinburgh’s HPC with Data Science MSc programme. He also plays the drums.