Anne-Marie Lyne

Biography

• 2004-2007 BA Physics, University of Cambridge
• 2007-2011 PGCE and secondary school Physics teacher
• 2011-2012 MRes Systems Biology, UCL
• 2012-present PhD, UCL (with Paul Gissen and Mark Girolami)

Research interests

I completed two projects during my MRes year:

1. Investigating the role of microRNA in the sea urchin, Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, specifically, how microRNA interact with the gene regulatory network of transcription factors which controls development. The 3'UTR of pmar1 was microinjected into sea urchin embryos and the expression of several (computationally predicted) genes was measured via QPCR.
2. MCMC techniques for Bayesian inference over ODE models, largely focused on developing a continuous version of simulated tempering. This could be used to draw samples from multi-modal posterior distributions of the type induced by the non-linear ODEs used to describe biochemical pathways.

Continuing on from the second project, I've been working on an MCMC algorithm to sample from doubly intractable distributions. This will allow Bayesian inference in cases where standard techniques such as the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm cannot be used.

The remainder of my PhD will involve using statistical techniques to analyse 'omic' data relating to a rare genetic disease called ARC syndrome. The aim is to identify differentially expressed genes/pathways and to develop methodology which can be used in the network-type problems which are common in Systems Biology.