Prof Neil Lawrence BEng PhD

Professor of Machine Learning and Computational Biology

Academic Neurology Unit
Department of Neuroscience
Sheffield Institute of Translational Neuroscience
University of Sheffield
385a Glossop Road
Sheffield
S10 2HQ

Telephone: +44 (0)114 22 22239
Fax: +44 (0)114 22 22290
Email: n.lawrence@sheffield.ac.uk

Secretary: Jo Brodie (Mon, Tue)
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 22262
Email:j.brodie@sheffield.ac.uk

Biography

I´m a Professor in Computational Biology and Machine Learning jointly appointed across the Departments of Neuroscience and Computer Science. I moved to Sheffield in August 2010 from the School of Computer Science in Manchester where I was a Senior Research Fellow.

Career

• 2010-present: Collaborative Chair in Neuro- and Computer Science, University of Sheffield
• 2007-2010: School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Senior Research Fellow
• 2004-2007: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Senior Lecturer in Machine Learning and Computational Biology
• 2001-2004: Department of Computer Science, University of Sheffield, Lecturer in Machine Learning
• 2000-2001: Microsoft Research Cambridge, Machine Learning Researcher

Research Interests

My research interests in machine learning, computational systems biology and their application in medicine.

Professional activities

• Member of the steering committee for the PASCALII FP7 Funded Network of Excellence.
• Associate Editor for IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
• Associate Editor for Journal of Machine Learning Research.
• Founding editor for the Journal of Machine Learning Research Workshop and Conference Proceedings and currently series editor.
• 2010 General Chair for the AISTATS conference.
• 2007-2009 Senior Program Committee for the International Conference in Machine Learning.
• 2005-2006 Area Chair for the Neural Information Processing Systems Conference.
• Member of the steering committee for the PASCALII FP7 Funded Network of Excellence.

Current projects

For a list of projects please see here

Key publications

A. Honkela, C. Girardot, E. H. Gustafson, Y.a.H. Liu, E. E. M. Furlong, N. D. Lawrence and M. Rattray. (2010) "Model-based method for transcription factor target identification with limited data" in Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA

P. Gao, A. Honkela, M. Rattray and N. D. Lawrence. (2008) "Gaussian process modelling of latent chemical species: applications to inferring transcription factor activities" in Bioinformatics 24, pp i70--i75

N. D. Lawrence (2005) "Probabilistic non-linear principal component analysis with Gaussian process latent variable models" in Journal of Machine Learning Research 6, pp 1783--1816