Bio
Pauline Luise Pfuderer is a PhD candidate in Computational Cancer Research at the University of Cambridge, where she previously completed an MRes in Cancer Biology. She is a scholar of Cancer Research UK and an honorary scholar of the Cambridge Trust. Previously, she received an MSc and BSc in Molecular Biotechnology (University of Heidelberg, Germany) as a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation. She studied abroad at Harvard University and was a visiting researcher at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ), the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. For her PhD research, she collaborates with clinical, molecular biology and cancer research groups in the UK, Canada and Australia.
Research interests
Biological data is exploding - the human genome alone comprises ~6 billion base-pairs and printing it out for a single person would result in a book with 2 million pages. One fundamental process of life is copying these 6 billion base-pairs during cell division to give rise to two genetically identical daughter cells. This process is called DNA replication. Pauline develops AI-based methods to decipher DNA replication dynamics, in alignment with the Turing’s focus on ‘Health’ and ‘Machine Learning for Cell and Molecular Biology’. DNA replication differs between healthy cells and cancer cells and can be exploited as a therapeutic target. To study the DNA replication process at ultra-high resolution, she uses deep neural networks and chemically modified DNA building blocks (base-analogues) to detect characteristic changes in sequencing signal.