Nick Maxfield
Mihaela van der SchaarThe van der Schaar Lab is delighted to welcome its newest member, Fergus Imrie, who officially joined on April 1 as a postdoctoral researcher. Fergus’ experience and dedication to translational research make him the ideal person to guide the lab’s formational work on topics at the cutting edge of machine learning, with the overarching aim of transforming healthcare.
Prior to joining the lab, Fergus completed his DPhil (PhD) at the University of Oxford in the Department of Statistics, developing deep learning approaches for drug discovery. Fergus values work with a strong translational impact: his research is currently being used by a number of pharmaceutical companies on active drug discovery projects to develop new therapeutics.
A core principle for me is that methodological advances/improvements should go hand-in-hand with scientific discovery, improved understanding, and the ability to do things we couldn’t do before.
– Fergus Imrie
As a postdoc working alongside the lab’s broader research team, Fergus will help shape research into a wide range of projects and areas, but he is particularly interested in self-supervised learning and methods for understanding clinical decision making. He is keen to work on problems in healthcare outside of drug discovery, while also solving fundamental challenges in machine learning.
As one of the dominant forces driving progress in a burgeoning area, the van der Schaar Lab continues to grow its research team. Six PhD students joined the lab in October 2020, and the 2021 intake of researchers will be announced in the coming months.
A full list of our current research team members can be found here.
