Machine learning and molecular biology requirements

These are two exemplar papers from the Oncinfo Lab, which illustrate the extend of biology and machine learning you need to know to be successful here as a PhD student. The bars are lower for MSc studnets and higher for postdocs.

1- If you want to join Oncinfo as a PhD student, you should be able to understand at least 15% of the following paper at the time you join. By the time you graduate, you should be able to read such a paper in 3 days and understand at least 70%.

Sun, Wenyan, et al. “Pathogenic tau-induced piRNA depletion promotes neuronal death through transposable element dysregulation in neurodegenerative tauopathies.” Nature neuroscience 21.8 (2018): 1038. [pdf ]

2- During your PhD, you should write at least 2 papers like the following. You are expected to perform >90% of the data analysis including method development and in silico experiments, and write >80% of the text.

Foroushani, Amir, et al. “Large-scale gene network analysis reveals the significance of extracellular matrix pathway and homeobox genes in acute myeloid leukemia: an introduction to the Pigengene package and its applications.” BMC medical genomics 10.1 (2017): 16.