12 December 2007 From Lincoln to Oxford

Professor Kulasiri will be a visitor attached to the Mathematical Institute which acts as a centre for the organisation of mathematics teaching and research throughout Oxford University.

Oxford's Centre for Integrative Systems Biology is funded to develop modelling approaches around data-rich molecular biological areas and it is keen to use and test different modelling approaches on a variety of biological problems.

The Centre sees Professor Kulasiri's proposed research as fitting into the range of modelling platforms being developed to address specific data-rich areas.

One of his research projects will look at developing mathematical approaches to understand the propagation of internal and external noises (variation) in genetic pathways. 

Among those he will be working with closely are Professor of Mathematical Biology Philip Maini, a leading figure in his field and managing editor of the Bulletin of Mathematical Biology, and Professor Judith Armitage of the Department of Biochemistry, the largest university biochemistry department in Europe, and Director of the Integrative Systems Biology Centre.

In the Oxford Centre for Gene Function, Associate Professor Samarasinghe will be working with Professor Chris Holmes and Professor Rick Ponting, the Programme Leader of the Functional Genomics Unit at the Department of Physiology and Genetics, and a contributor to the Human Genome Project. She will be pursuing research in the area of neural networks for genomic data analysis. The Oxford Centre for Gene Function received a Mention at the 2005 Civic Trust Awards.

Coincidentally, Professor Holmes who is a professor in the field of statistics and genomic analysis, is a Fellow of Oxford University's Lincoln College.

Associate Professor Samarasinghe's book Neural Networks for Applied Sciences and Engineering, published by Taylor and Francis (USA), was in the top seller list in 2006-2007 in its field. 

Recently Professor Kulasiri farewelled Lincoln University's first PhD in integrative systems biology, Zhi Xie, who won a postdoctoral fellowship taking him to the Medical School at prestigious John Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, where he is now working on genetic regulatory pathways using protein chips data. Professor Kulasiri supervised his doctoral thesis.

Ian Collins, Communications Group, Lincoln University, Canterbury, New Zealand