RSC Desktop Seminar with Molecular Omics

Dr. Choi is associate professor in Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore and an investigator in Cardiovascular Research Institute, National University Health System. He obtained PhD in Biostatistics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA, and was further trained as post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Pathology, University of Michigan Medical School before moving to Singapore in 2010.
 
His main research interest is in developing new data analytic approaches and statistical computing solutions for large-scale single- and multi-omics data analysis, with application to cell biology and clinical biomarker studies. 

Dr Albert Koulman is the head of the Metabolomics and Lipidomics Laboratory and the Nutritional Biomarker Laboratory of the University of Cambridge (UK), he is also a PI at Metabolic Research Laboratories of the Institute of Metabolic Sciences in Cambridge. His main research focus involves developing cutting-edge analytical methods to measure specific metabolites and nutrients, and using these methods to facilitate the further understanding of our metabolism and of the role of metabolism in disease and he has published over 100 peer reviewed papers.
 
The current technical challenge is to comprehensively analyse all metabolites and lipids (aka metabolomics and lipidomics), which demands developments in experimental design, sample preparation, analysis, data processing and bioinformatics. He has been responsible for the development and application of novel analytical pipelines. These methods enables him to measure metabolites (fatty acids, lipids, etc.) in very large population studies, some of which are still the largest in the world, as well as to measure lipids in single cells (single cell lipidomics). His team is currently using these results to understand how genetics and diet are associated with disease risk through metabolism. This has resulted, for example, in new understanding of the metabolism of odd chain fatty acids and their relation to diabetes risk. He was the first to adapt lipid-profiling methodology to use dried blood spots to measure lipid metabolism in healthy infants, leading to the development of biomarkers for infant nutrition. He is also working on the development and applications of methods to study the composition of human milk and infant nutrition. This will all help to improve our understanding on the role of lipids in healthy development for mother and child.