Professor Walter R Gilks, Director
Centre for Statistical Bioinformatics
Department of Statistics
School of Mathematics
University of Leeds
Leeds
West Yorkshire
LS2 9JT
UK

Tel: (+44) (113) 343 5119
Fax: (+44) (113) 343 5090
Email: wally.gilks@maths.leeds.ac.uk

Where's Wally?
Room 10.26, School of Mathematics Satellite, Red Route (Level 10),
E.C. Stoner Building, University Campus, Leeds

Current Interests

• Statistical methods in bioinformatic research:
  
  • Director for M.Sc. in Statistical Bioinformatics
    
  • A popular article Bioinformatics: new science - new statistics? published in Significance, 2004
    
  • A short course on Statistical Bioinformatics presented at the RSS 2006 conference, Belfast
  • Co-organiser of Stochastic Computation in the Biological Sciences at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, including a workshop on Recent Advances in Statistical Genetics and Bioinformatics, Oct-Dec 2006
    
  • C# Program for computing a metric to compare multiple DNA alignments or RNA structured alignments
    
• Monte Carlo methods in statistical inference:
  
  • Fortran and C code for Adaptive Rejection Sampling from complex univariate distributions
    
  • Book on Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Practice by W.R. Gilks, S. Richardson and D.J. Spiegelhalter
    

Selected Recent Publications

• Phylogenetics
• Tom M. W. Nye, Pietro Liò, and Walter R. Gilks. A novel algorithm and web-based tool for comparing two alternative phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics 2006, 22, 117-119.
• Protein interactions
• Tom M. W. Nye, Carlo Berzuini, Walter R. Gilks, M. Madan Babu, Sarah Teichmann. Predicting the strongest domain-domain contact in interacting protein pairs. Statistical Applications in Genetics and Molecular Biology 2006, 5(1).
• Tom M. W. Nye, Carlo Berzuini, Walter R. Gilks, M. Madan Babu, and Sarah A. Teichmann. Statistical analysis of domains in interacting protein pairs. Bioinformatics 2005, 21, 991-1001.
• Microarrays
• Walter R. Gilks, Brian D. M. Tom and Alvis Brazma. Fusing microarray experiments with multivariate regression. Bioinformatics 2005, 21, ii137 - ii143.
• Brian D. M. Tom, Walter R. Gilks, Elizabeth T. Brooke-Powell and James W. Ajioka. Quality determination and the repair of poor quality spots in array experiments. BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6, 234.
• Regulatory DNA
• Irina Abnizova and Walter R. Gilks. Studying statistical properties of regulatory DNA sequences, and their use in predicting regulatory regions in the eukaryotic genomes. Briefings in Bioinformatics 2006, 7, 48-54.
• Irina Abnizova, Rene te Boekhorst, Klaudia Walter and Walter R. Gilks. Some statistical properties of regulatory DNA sequences, and their use in predicting regulatory regions in the Drosophila genome: the fluffy-tail test. BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6, 109.
• Highly conserved non-coding DNA
• Tanya Vavouri, Klaudia Walter, Walter R. Gilks, Ben Lehner and Greg Elgar. Parallel evolution of conserved noncoding elements that target a common set of developmental regulatory genes from worms to humans. Genome Biology 2007, (in press).
• Tanya Vavouri, Gayle K. McEwen, Adam Woolfe, Walter R. Gilks and Greg Elgar. Defining a genomic radius for long-range enhancer action: duplicated conserved non-coding elements hold the key. Trends in Genetics 2006, 22, 5-10.
• Klaudia Walter, Irina Abnizova, Greg Elgar and Walter R. Gilks. Striking nucleotide frequency pattern at the borders of highly conserved vertebrate non-coding sequences.. Trends in Genetics 2005, 21, 436-440.
• Database annotation errors
• Walter R. Gilks, Benjamin Audit, Daniela de Angelis, Sophia Tsoka, Christos A. Ouzounis. Percolation of annotation errors through hierarchically structured protein sequence databases. Mathematical Biosciences 2005, 193, 223-234.
• Emmanuel D. Levy, Christos A. Ouzounis, Walter R. Gilks and Benjamin Audit. Probabilistic annotation of protein sequences based on functional classifications. BMC Bioinformatics 2005, 6, 302.

Honours
Guy Medal in Silver awarded by the Royal Statistical Society in 2000

Teaching

• Undergraduate (2006/2007):
  MATH2770: Medical Statistics (Semester 2)
  
• Postgraduate (2007/2008):
  M.Sc. in Statistical Bioinformatics (Director and Lecturer)