About
I’m a computational research scientist working on identifying and prioritising innovative drug targets.
I currently work as a senior scientist at BenevolentAI. Previously, I was a postdoctoral scientist working on ageing-related multimorbidities with the Centre for Medicines Discovery (CMD, University of Oxford) and Open Targets (EMBL-EBI), and I completed my PhD in Protein Informatics at the Department of Statistics, University of Oxford.
Background
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Senior Scientist, BenevolentAI July 2021 - present Applied Drug Discovery Analyst |
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Postdoctoral Informatics Scientist, Centre for Medicines Discovery/Structural Genomics Consortium, University of Oxford, and Open Targets (EMBL-EBI) Jan 2020 - June 2021 Identifying potential novel targets for age-related multimorbidities to drive new understanding of the ageing process and facilitate drug development. |
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DPhil Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science, University of Oxford (Lincoln College) 2015 - 2020 Exploring protein folding mechanisms to enable the protein structure prediction of previously intractable targets. Based in the Oxford Protein Informatics Group (OPIG) in the Department of Statistics, under the supervision of Prof. Charlotte Deane and in collaboration with Jiye Shi and Sebastian Kelm at UCB Pharma. |
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POST Fellowship, Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology September 2018 - January 2019 Produced a POSTnote (Parliamentary briefing) on the Cyber Security of Consumer Devices. |
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Three month research project, Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford 2016 Optimising anti-cancer treatment schedules to exploit competition and delay growth of therapy-resistant tumours, supervised by Prof. Helen Byrne and Prof. Eamonn Gaffney (Wolfson Centre for Mathematical Biology), Michael Davis and James Yates (AstraZeneca). |
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BSc (Hons) Biochemistry, University of Nottingham 2012 - 2015 Six month research project with Dr Ed Bolt, investigating the effect of a truncation mutation within the human DNA repair gene HELQ and its archaeal homologue Hel308. |
Publications and Presentations
| Clare E. West, Saulo H.P. de Oliveira & Charlotte M. Deane. (2019) RFQAmodel: Random Forest Quality Assessment to identify a predicted protein structure in the correct fold. PLoS ONE [See also ISMB 2019 talk: video, slides and poster.] |
| Clare E. West & Lydia Harriss. (2019) Cyber Security of Consumer Devices (Parliamentary Briefing), POSTnote 593, Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology |
| Clare E. West, Saulo H.P. de Oliveira, Eleanor C. Law, Sebastian Kelm, Jiye Shi, Charlotte M. Deane. (2018) Efficient Sampling for the Prediction of Long and Multidomain Protein Structures (Poster), Biophysical Society 62nd Annual Meeting |
| Bernhard Knapp, Marta Alcala, Hao Zhang, Clare E. West, P Anton van der Merwe, Charlotte M Deane. (2018) pyHVis3D: Visualising Molecular Simulation deduced H-bond networks in 3D: Application to T-cell receptor interactions. Bioinformatics. |