Cen Wan, PhD
Lecturer in Computer Science
cen.wan{at}bbk.ac.uk
Birkbeck, University of London
Malet St,
London, 
WC1E 7HX


Recent News
  • One paper was accepted by Briefings in Functional Genomics.

  • One paper was accepted by ACM SAC 2024.

  • One paper was accepted by IEEE BIBM 2023.

  • Two extended abstracts were accepted by ISMB/ECCB 2023.



Academic Experience

I am a lecturer (
≈ 
assistant professor) in computer science at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Birkbeck, University of London. 
I was a post-doctoral researcher in machine learning and bioinformatics at the Bioinformatics Group (Professor David T. Jones' Lab), Department of Computer Science, University College London (UCL), and jointly affiliated with the Biomedical Data Science Laboratory at the Francis Crick Institute. 
Before joining UCL, I was pursuing the PhD in computer science at the University of Kent (supervised by Professor Alex A. Freitas), where I continued my research interests on developing novel machine learning and data mining classification algorithms. I started research on machine learning (
supervised by Dr Irina V. Biktasheva) at the University of Liverpool.

I was with the ProCovar project being sponsored by the ERC Advanced Grant, after finishing the BBSRC flagship Strategic LoLa project - DDIP (Drosophila Developmental Interactome Project), to characterise the developmental proteome of Drosophila melanogaster.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the algorithmic novelty of machine learning and data mining methods, particularly in large language models, contrastive learning and hierarchy/structure-constrained algorithms. I am also interested in the research of machine learning applications, particularly in bioinformatics and computational biology, e.g. single cell RNA-seq data analysis, biological sequence analysis and gene/protein function prediction.