My name is Kasia* Kedzierska; I am a computational biologist and I use Data Science and Machine Learning to answer biological questions.

For my PhD, I’m looking at the cancer of the uterus, and I’m trying to understand what role chromatin organisation plays in its initiation and progression. Here, you can read more about my DPhil (Oxford speak for PhD) project. Last year, I joined Computational Biology Department at Novo Nordisk Research Centre in Oxford as an intern, where I worked with NLP methods and knowledge graphs. Since returning to my studies, I’ve been working on adapting what I learned during the internship and building ML models of cancer evolution.

I like data viz, and I believe that a good figure can help convey the message but a whereas one can confuse a reader. In my free time, I look at various data trying to make sense of it. I describe some of my projects, for example exploring COVID-19 mortality figures, in the posts on this website.

I am the President of the NGSchool Society - an organisation that aims to promote and support science with an emphasis on bioinformatics. We focus our efforts on bridging the gap between Western and Eastern Europe in the area of R&D. Each year, we organise cutting-edge affordable training in computational biology. This year, for the first time since the pandemic, we came back with an in-person summer school (NGSchool2022: Machine Learning in Computational Biology) and a hybrid conference (NGSymposium2022 in Computational Biology). You can find more about our projects here or on our website.

Before coming to Oxford, I worked as a research assistant in the Ratan group at the University of Virginia and the Zebrafish Developmental Genomics group at the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. I studied for BScEng and MSc in Biotechnology at the Warsaw University of Technology in Poland.

*Actually, my full name is Katarzyna Kedzierska, or Katarzyna Zofia Kedzierska (including my middle name). In Polish, we usually have a shorter version of a name that we go by and reserve the full legal name (here: Katarzyna) for official occasions, or when we get in trouble with our parents. Here you can find recordings on how to pronounce my shorter name: Kasia or longer: Katarzyna.