Nataša Pržulj, Ph.D., MAE

Professor of Biomedical Data Science

Computer Science
University College London

ICREA Research Professor

Life Sciences Department
Barcelona Supercomputing Center

As of January 1st, 2019, I am on leave as an ICREA Research Professor to Barcelona Supercomputing Center. I kept my position at UCL and part of my lab is still here. This web page is not regularly maintained, so please go to my up-to-date web page at BSC.

Education

Ph.D. in Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada, 2005
M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of Toronto, Canada, 2000
B.Sc. First Class Honors in Maths and Computer Science, Simon Fraser University, Canada, 1997

Biography

Prof. Przulj initiated extraction of biomedical knowledge from the wiring patterns (topology, structure) of "Big Data" real-world molecular (omics) and other networks. That is, she views the wiring patterns of large and complex omics networks, disease ontologies, clinical patient data, drug-drug and drug-target interaction networks etc., as a new source of information that complements the genetic sequence data and needs to be mined and meaningfully integrated to gain deeper biomedical understanding. Her recent work includes designing machine learning methods for integration of heterogeneous biomedical and molecular data, applied to advancing biological and medical knowledge. She also applies her methods to economics. She is:

• a member of the Editorial Boards of Bioinformatics (Oxford Journals), Scientific Reports (Nature Publishing Group) and Frontiers in Genetics (Frontiers),
• an Associate Editor of the Journal of Complex Networks (Oxford Academic) and BMC Bioinformatics (BioMed Central),
• a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research (HZI / Braunschweig, Germany), and
• the Proceedings / Area Chair of Protein Interactions, Molecular Networks and Network Biology tracks at the ISMB/ECCB 2015, ISMB 2016 and ISMB/ECCB 2017.

For more details, please see Prof. Przulj's CV, Semantic Scholar Citations, Google Scholar Citations, or the list of publications and the research page.

Awards

Prof. Przulj was elected into Academia Europaea, The Academy of Europe, in 2017. In 2013, she was elected into the Young Academy of Europe. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. She was awarded the British Computer Society Roger Needham Award for 2014 in recognition of the potential her research and work has to revolutionise health and pharmaceutics -- the award is given annually for a distinguished research contribution in computer science by a UK based researcher within ten years of their PhD.

She received two prestigious, single PI, European Research Council (ERC) grants:

• a 2 million Euro ERC Consolidator Grant for her 2018-2023 project titled "Integrated Connectedness for a New Representation of Biology (ICON-BIO)" and
• a 1.64 million Euro ERC Starting Independent Researcher Grant for 2012-2017 for her project titled "Biological Network Topology Complements Genome as a Source of Biological Information."

She held a USA analogue to an ERC Starting Grant, a prestigious NSF CAREER Award, for the project titled "Tools for Analyzing, Modeling, and Comparing Protein-Protein Interaction Networks" in 2007-2011 at University of California Irvine. Her research has also been supported by other large governmental and industrial grants including those from GlaxoSmithKline, IBM and Google.

Press Highlights

• ERC Consolidator Grant for Nataša Pržulj, UCL Computer Science News, Dec. 12, 2017
• PIMS-SFU 20th Anniversary Celebration: Nataša Pržulj - Data Driven Medicine, Nov. 25th, 2016
• "Conquering Cancer" by Mike Hall, ITNOW (Autumn 2016) 58 (3): 40-41 doi:10.1093/itnow/bww076 (Oxford Journals; The British Computer Society), September 2016
• Public lecture at The Royal Society in London, November 19, 2014.
  Video available at YouTube and at BCS
• Awarded the 2014 BCS Roger Needham Award sponsored by Microsoft Research Cambridge
• BCS video interview, 2014

Affiliations

• Academia Europaea, The Academy of Europe
• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• British Computer Society (BCS)
• International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB)
• Young Academy of Europe (YAE)

the PROSTATE project, help us beat prostate cancer, please donate