Online Delivery (Link sent to registered participants)

Aimed at: All Years

Duration: <0.5 day

CENTA Training Credits: 1

Training Area(s): Theme Science and Technical Skills

Environmental pollution is the leading cause of the premature death of an estimated nine million people worldwide. A deep understanding of the diagnostic linkages between pollution and perturbation of biological communities requires the intersection of environmental big data with multi-omics data, such as genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, and metagenomics.

Analysing these diverse data within the same environment poses interoperability issues, scalability challenges resulting from complex and high-dimensional datasets, and the need for explainability in deriving reliable and human-understandable models from noisy data.

In this webinar, Dr Zhou will address these challenges by presenting advances in machine learning paradigms such as multimodal learning, explainable machine learning, and graph modelling. He will present the application of these advanced algorithms to multi-omics data to identify key biological pathways and biomarkers associated with environmental pollutants and capture the complex network structures of environmental omics data, and will provide a few examples of applications to real-world datasets.

About Dr Zhou:

Dr Zhou is an Assistant Professor in Environmental Bioinformatics at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham. He is a funding academic member of the Centre for Environmental Research and Advocacy (CERA) and a member of the Centre for Computational Biology (CCB).

Dr Zhou's expertise lies in machine learning and computational biology. His research focuses on using AI/ML techniques, such as multimodal learning, explainable machine learning, graph machine learning, and network biology, to integrate and analyse multi-omics big data. Dr Zhou aims to bridge the gap between the computational and biological fields to understand and predict complex biological systems and ecosystems. He is dedicated to applying his research to tackle emerging challenges in environmental studies, with a special focus on (eco)toxicology and biodiversity.

Analysis of Environmental Omics Data: Theory and Applied Examples