Data Champions Search

Didem cares about the future of the world and nature. She is a computer scientist with a Ph.D. in mechatronics, which can give you an idea about how much she loves to talk about the future and emerging technologies. She is a data person, always finds a way to talk about how important it is to know your data, use it to make decisions and at some point expect her to talk about art, visualizations and visual analytics. Didem is a person who does not hesitate to talk about inequalities and point out her ethical concerns. She dreams of a better world and actively works on improving inequalities regardless of their nature. She is an analytical thinker with a passion for design thinking, a researcher with a future perspective, an engineer who likes problems more than solutions and a teacher who likes to play during lectures. She is a good reader, sailor, divemaster, photographer and drone pilot. 

Didem's current research interest is on data science for cyber-physical systems including interoperability assessment, data analytics, knowledge discovery, information visualization and visual analytics. Didem’s research focuses on blending systems thinking, future studies and design thinking approaches to develop methods, methodologies and implementations for the purpose of overcoming interoperability, complexity and sustainability challenges related to cyber-physical systems such as smart infrastructure systems, autonomous vehicles and collaborative robots. She works on data, visual analytics and digital twins to improve the interoperability between these systems, to make these systems more understandable and to develop sustainable systems for a better future.

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.

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.

My research involves developing computational methods to explore the chemical biology of the genome and investigating proteins catalysing chemical modifications in DNA.

Additional areas of expertise:

Computational biology/chemistry.