Colleges
Patrick Pflughaupt
DPhil
I completed my D.Phil. (Ph.D.) as part of the Sahakyan Group: Integrative Computational Biology and Machine Learning (2020-2024).
My research offers novel insights into the sequence basis of DNA fragility. I identified sequence-driven patterns influencing DNA fragility by analysing hundreds of DNA breakage datasets, showing the effect across the short, medium, and long sequence ranges (GitHub). The short-range k-meric fragility scores were quantified and summarised as a feature library (DNAfrAIlib) and integrated into a sequence-based machine learning model for DNA fragility (GitHub). The model was used to understand the effect of structural variants, chromothripsis, viral integration into the human genome, and improve de novo genome assembly algorithms.
My work was published in numerous journals and presented at six conferences globally.
Previously, I graduated from UCL with a BSc Chemistry and MRes Molecular Modelling and Materials Science. Outside of science, my interest lies in triathlons, detective novels, and planespotting.