Biography

I got my MPhys Physics (First Class Honours) degree from the University of Surrey, UK, which included a year long research placement at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics, IN, USA.

I started my PhD study on a Doctoral Training Centre (DTC) programme in October 2010 and joined the Department of Computing, University of Surrey, UK since October 2011. My principal supervisor is Prof. Yaochu Jin and my co-supervisors are Prof. Colin Smith and Dr. Emma Laing (bioinformatics).

In October I was awarded full funding to attend the Sao Paulo School of Advanced Science on e-Science for Bioenergy Research (SPSAS) programme in Brazil (http://www2.bioetanol.org.br/escibioenergy/). The programme consisted of tutorials and workshops for dealing with large data and some techniques for mining, analysing and modelling large data sets. 

Research Interests

My current research topics involve the synthesis, analysis and reconstruction of gene regulatory networks using evolutionary algorithms. This includes simulating possible mechanisms for evolution in a biological environment and the modelling of Streptomyces coeilcolor from gene expression data. Recently I have begun to investigate a model of the sleep-wake cycle using gene regulatory networks and evolutionary algorithms. 

Areas of particular interest for the synthesis and analysis of gene regulatory networks; the robustness and tunability of genetic oscillators, the effect of objective set up, fitness definition and multiobjectivization, the coupling of small network mofits and investigating the process of gene duplication and deletion.

Publications

Published

S. A. Thomas and Y. Jin, Combining genetic oscillators and switches using evolutionary algorithms,
in Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB),
2012 IEEE Symposium on, may 2012, pp. 28 34. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6217207

Accepted

S. A. Thomas and Y. Jin, Single and Multi-Objective in Silico Evolution of Tunable Genetic
Oscillators," 7th International Conference on Evolutionary Multi-Criterion Optimization 2013,
accepted 5th Nov. 2012. https://www.shef.ac.uk/emo2013

Submitted

S. A. Thomas and Y. Jin, Evolving Connectivity between Genetic Oscillators and Switches
using Evolutionary Algorithms," Journal of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (special
issue), submitted 25th Sept. 2012. http://www.worldscientific.com/worldscinet/jbcb