Conor Walker

Welcome! I am a bioinformatics scientist with a research background focusing on developing and applying statistical and machine learning models to human ‘omics data. I am currently working in computational immuno-oncology research and development at Moderna.

Previously I conducted postdoctoral research at the New York Genome Center and Columbia University, where I led work showcasing how a variety of statistical methods can be used to enable private information leakage from single-cell data.

I received my PhD from the University of Cambridge, undertaking my research at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). The main focus of my PhD was to statistically model small-scale rearrangements in human genomes. I also developed deep learning-based tests for detecting interspecific positive selection that are robust to alignment error, as well as working on several projects involving sequence and molecular evolutionary analyses of SARS-CoV-2 genomes.

Before my PhD, I completed my masters degee in Bioinformatics at Newcastle University, exploring the application of multi-objective optimization algorithms for designing sequences used in DNA computing systems.