Chi Fung Joseph Ng

  • Scholarship in 2016 at King's College London

Joseph graduated with first class honours the degree of Bachelor of Biomedical Sciences at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). He is broadly interested in cancer, structural biology and the "-omics" sciences; and in particular, the interpretation of genomic variations using both protein structure and network data.

During his year of exchange study at King’s College London, Joseph worked with Dr. Yu-Wai Chen (then at Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics), on crystalisation screens of a short polyglutamine RNA, and molecular dynamics simulations of the AXH domain of human ataxin-1 protein to study the intrinsic structural plasticity of this protein domain. He carried out his Final Year Project with Prof. Suet-Yi Leung (Pathology, HKU) on characterising intratumoural heterogeneity in different molecular subtypes of gastric cancer with bioinformatics tools.

Joseph is also interested in ethical and policy questions surrounding medical sciences, in particular the application of the “-omics” technologies in practice. He has recently published on the personal utility of direct-to-consumer genomic testing (Chung & Ng, 2016, Journal of Medical Ethics). He also believes in the open sharing of standardised datasets and the development of user-friendly, high-quality online data portals and analysis packages to democratise reproducible bioinformatics data analysis.

Currently

Joseph is currently a PhD Student at the Randall Centre for Cell and Molecular Biophysics of King's College London. In his thesis he uses a bioinformatics approach to study the acquisition and consequence of somatic mutations in cancer. Particular focus has been on the APOBEC3 cytidine deaminases, a group of enzymes responsible for many sequence variants found in tumours across cancer types. He also works more broadly on methods development and analysis of protein structural data, and the use of network theoretical tools to study protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions.