Members

Alex J H Fedorec Group leader he/him
I am a group leader (assistant professor/lecturer) in the Division of Biosciences at University College London, UK. My research involves applying computational and mathematical techniques to understand and engineer new biological systems. I am particularly interested in biotherapeutic and bioindustrial applications of biological engineering with a focus on creating stable and predictable synthetic microbial communities in complex environments, such as the gastrointestinal tract.

I was previously a Research Fellow in the Computational Systems and Synthetic Biology group in the Department of Cell & Developmental Biology at University College London, UK. I have a background in computer science and industrial experience as a software engineer at Research in Motion (now BlackBerry).

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Alice Cook PhD student 2023-
I am a PhD student on the London Interdisciplinary Biosciences Consortium DTP (LIDo). My research will look at motility, patterning, and information processing in cellular communities, as part of the Fedorec group at UCL and the Bentley group at the Francis Crick Institute. Previously, I completed a BASc in Arts and Sciences at UCL. I also completed a PhD rotation project in the Pearce and Barnes groups at UCL looking at experimental and computational design of self-organised patterning via chemical signalling in microbial communities, and a further rotation project with the Logan group (King's College London) and Bentley group on fibroblast, ECM, and muscle fibre disorganisation in congenital limb abnormalities using wet-lab and agent-based modelling approaches.

Yue (Casey) Chen PhD student 2023-
I am a PhD student on the EPSCR CDT BioDesign Engineering program. I am interested in engineering biological systems so they perform as we desire. My current project focuses on tunning microbial interactions to establish microbial communities and using computational tools to predict and design them. Before joining the group, I worked as a research assistant at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (SIAT), focusing on the characterisation of a biofilm-derived electroconductive protein. I completed an MRes in Systems and Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London and BSc in Molecular Genetics at the University of Edinburgh.

Louie Destouches PhD student 2023- he/him
I am a PhD student on the UCL EPSRC DTP program exploring the robustness of synthetic microbial communities to environmental factors. I grew up in France and moved to the UK for my Bachelor's in Biological Sciences with one year abroad in Hong Kong. I returned to Paris for a Masters focused on Systems and Synthetic Biology at the Learning Planet Institute/Université Paris Cité with research projects at INRAE, Institut Curie and Institut Pasteur. I was also team leader of the 2022 Paris-Bettencourt team for the international synthetic biology iGEM competition, where we built interfaces between bacterial genetics and electronics. Beyond my research, I have an interest in aquaponics and am a member of the Center of Art and Ecology at the University of Goldmiths, where I teach microbiology practicals to artists. For my PhD project, I work with bacteria and yeast communities, understanding how these different communities behave in response to changes in their environment, and leveraging those mechanisms to control community dynamics.

David Gao MSci Computational Biology 2025-26
I am a 3rd year Msci Computational Biology(Biological Sciences) student and am doing my investigative project here. I have strong interests in Artificial Intelligence. My project would involve interpreting protein language models by processing output from each attention layer, of PLMs based on different architecture, into small downstream heads to see if language models understand protein properties or if they still remain relative ‘black boxes’. I think this would allow biologists to develop more trust for PLMs. I previously did research at Ziheng Yang’s lab to compare statistical properties of coalescent programs and have a publication coming up as a result. I am Chinese but was educated in UK since 10, so I’m fluent in both languages and love both cultures. In my free time I really enjoy doing Brazilian Jiujitsu.

Shuchong Zhong BSc Biological Sciences 2025-26
I am an undergraduate student in Biological Sciences at University College London, currently completing my final year research project in the group. My interests lie in computational biology and data science, with a focus on applying statistical and programming approaches to study biological systems.

Ryan Kingston MSci Biological Sciences 2025-26
I am a final-year MSci Biological Sciences student at UCL, specializing in Cell Biology. My research interests include space biology, extremophiles, and sustainable biotechnology. Currently, my master’s project will be focusing on AI-guided nutrient control for stabilizing synthetic microbial co-cultures, integrating deep reinforcement learning models into continuous bioreactor systems.

Andrej Mitrovic MSci Natural Sciences 2025-26
I am an undergraduate studying Biomedical Sciences as my major stream and mathematics and statistics as my minor. I am particularly interested in immunology and applying computational approaches to study the gut microbiome and its role in autoimmune disease. I previously gained experience in machine learning during a statistics internship at AstraZeneca. I am now building on this in my third-year literature project, which explores machine learning applications for microbiome-based diagnostics.

Tianxin Lu BSc Biological Sciences 2025-26