Postgraduate research students

Currently I am in the early stages of a PhD project studying tropism and emergence of virulent companion animal viruses with the University of Glasgow under the supervision of Dr Maxwell Farrell. This project aims to apply Large Language Models to study the factors that allow viruses of companion animals to evolve from monotropic to pantropic infectious phenotypes. In addition, we are exploring the potential for the production of a veterinary research database which performs real-time text mining to produce networks of virus diagnostic and evolutionary associations.

The first stage of my study currently comprises a genetic and protein analysis of feline calicivirus. This project will look for factors associated with disease pathotypes in calicivirus by assessing genomic, protein structure, and clinical meta data. Machine learning models will be applied to determine which factors are predictive of different disease pathotypes.

I currently organise and run a text mining interest group within the University of Glasgow, which brings together researchers using text mining methods in their work for regular meetings and discussion.

• Dr Maxwell Farrell
• Professor Willie Weir
• Professor Margaret Hosie

University of Glasgow Computational Biology Conference 2025

Demonstrator on:

- Omic Data Analysis and Visualisation, using R, for Biologists BIOL5254
- Data Exploration and Interpretation for Bioinformatics BIOL5379