Charlotte Deane, PhD

Professor of Structural Bioinformatics at University of Oxford

Speaker

Charlotte Deane MBE is a Professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford and the Executive Chair of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC). From 2022 to 2023, Charlotte was Chief AI Officer at Exscientia, a biotech with ~450 employees, where she led its computational scientific development. She served on SAGE, the UK Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and acted as UK Research and Innovation’s COVID-19 Response Director. At Oxford, Charlotte leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG), who work on diverse problems across immunoinformatics, protein structure and small molecule drug discovery; using statistics, AI and computation to generate biological and medical insight. Her work focuses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines. Charlotte is a member of several advisory boards and has consulted extensively with industry. Additionally, she has established a consulting arm within her research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and use of the group’s software tools.