Data Champions Search

I am a researcher and educator in paleoanthropology and biology. Currently, I am developing machine learning and AI applications for human evolutionary studies with the University of Cambridge Leverhulme Center for Human Evolutionary Studies and the Alan Turing Institute.

I am a PhD student based at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit and the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge. My research is aimed at disentangling the relationship between technology use and youth mental health. I am passionate about Open Science, and I am a junior representative of Rotterdam RIOT a science club that promotes reproducible, interpretable, open and transparent research practices. Before my PhD, I graduated in Psychology from Erasmus University Rotterdam and subsequently attended an MSc in Research Methods at the University of Oxford.

I am a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge in Dr Paula MacGregor’s group. My research focuses on the parasites that cause African trypanosomiasis, a disease with significant burden in sub-Saharan Africa. Specifically, I use proteomics to spatially map the proteomes of African trypanosome species. This work will provide much needed functional insight into the cell biology of these parasites as well as their evolutionary diversification.

Additional areas of expertise:

Proteomics, Microbiology.

Qi received her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she developed computational methods to study alternative splicing and the evolution of HIV. Later she joined the UCLA Division of Dermatology to help identify the resistance mechanisms of targeted cancer therapies using computational tools. 
    
In 2011 she was awarded the Humboldt Research Fellowship to work in the Division of Theoretical Bioinformatics, and later the Division of Applied Bioinformatics, at the German Cancer Research Centre. There she worked on diverse bioinformatics projects with NGS data, such as studying genome-wide epigenetic regulation of cell differentiation, developing sequencing protocols and detecting somatic mutations from whole-genome sequencing data, as well as data integration and predictive modelling. 
    
Currently, she provides bioinformatics training and support to PhD students and postdoctoral researchers in the lab of Professor Beverley Glover.