Dr. V. Anne Smith University of St Andrews, UK

Dr V Anne Smith runs an integrative research programme combining computational sciences with an experimental microbiology laboratory at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She can trace her dual interest in biology and computation back to her undergraduate days, where she received a degree in Biology with a Mathematics... read moreminor from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Her PhD work at Indiana University examined animal behaviour from a complex systems perspective. She has since done research in areas as diverse as neuroscience, genetics, cancer and ecology. Much of her current work concentrates on the problem of ‘network inference’, the discovery of network structure from observational data. She was on the forefront of application of Bayesian networks for inferring gene regulatory networks and pioneered the use of Bayesian networks to infer neural information flow networks and ecological interaction networks. She continues to develop improvements for Bayesian network inference algorithms in genetics, neuroscience, and ecology. She is heavily involved in undergraduate teaching across all years, and in curriculum development. She has particular experience in conveying quantitative topics to biology students and regularly involves undergraduates in active interdisciplinary research.