University of Oxford

The University of Oxford is a stimulating organisation, which enjoys an international reputation as a world-class centre of excellence in research and teaching. It employs over 10,000 staff and has a student population of over 21,000. The Departments of Computer Science and Engineering are part of the Mathematical, Physical and Life Sciences Division at the University of Oxford. The Computational Biology Group (CBG) in the Department of Computer Science is one of the main Research Themes in the Department. CBG has played a leading role in establishing and maintaining a number of major initiatives and large-scale research activities in Oxford, including the Oxford e-Science (now e-Research) Centre; the BBSRC-funded Oxford Centre for Integrative Systems Biology; and the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics. Research funding into the group over the last 8 years since its inception comes from a wide range of sources (EPSRC, MRC, BBSRC, Wellcome Trust, EU), totals over £20M and includes major research projects such as FP7-funded euHeart, PreDiCT, Synergy and AIRPROM projects, the FP7 VPH Network of Excellence, and the EPSRC-funded 2020 Science Programme. The Computational Biology Group has strong links to industry having received both direct (totalling over £2M) and in-kind funding from IBM, Fujitsu, Microsoft Research, Mathworks, GE Healthcare, Janssen Pharmaceutica and GSK. It has collaborative links with pharmaceutical companies Janssen Pharmaceuticals, AstraZeneca, Roche, Novartis and Pfizer and with clinicians at major hospitals in the UK such as the Heart hospital and the John Radcliffe Hospital.

Oxford University will play a leading role under WP2 in cardiovascular exemplar research and will play a substantial role in the adaption to commodity high-end infrastructure. The CGB brings its extended experience in computational cardiovascular and respiratory biology. They are leaders on automated analysis of in vivo and in vitro cardiac images, quantification methods of cardiac diffusion MRI scans and the generation of volume meshes from images. Their research involves a synergistic clinical, experimental and computational approach, to simulate “in silico” models to improve risk identification under different disease and conditions They also work on cardiac modelling, simulation of computational ECG’s and on signal processing techniques to analyze ECG recordings.

The group has developed Chaste, the multiscale, multi-physics simulation commercial software for systems biology, with primary applications in modelling cardiac and respiratory physiology, cancer, and discrete multiscale cell-based simulations, that will be one of the core software of the consortia.