I have a project advertised as part of the DPhil in Computational Discovery programme at the University of Oxford to start in October 2023. This programme is jointly run with IBM and benefits from their applied research in machine learning and other shared areas of interest. The project (Project 6) aims to develop graph-based convolutional […]
Author: Philip Fowler
Philip W Fowler is a computational biophysicist studying antimicrobial resistance working at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford.
Congratulations Dr Brankin!

Alice successfully defended her thesis “Predicting Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis” yesterday. Her examiners were Professor Philip Biggin and Dr Esther Robinson. Much of Alice’s research was done during various SARS-CoV-2 lockdowns and I doubt she thought at the start she’d be using Microsoft Teams so much. Despite this she has produced some excellent research and […]
More good news for the group! Philip was awarded an Associate Professorship by the Nuffield Department of Medicine along with two other researchers.
The whole group attended the first INEOS Oxford Institute meeting on Multidisciplinary Approaches to AMR on Tuesday 22 November 2022. Great to hear how different research groups around Oxford (and elsewhere) are helping to tackle AMR. Best of all though, Viki Brunner won one of the poster prizes for her poster on Compensatory mutations in […]
Fluoroquinolones are used to treat both normal and drug resistant tuberculosis and therefore being able to work out if an infection is resistant or not to fluoroquinolones is very important. Sequencing the genome of an infection is increasingly used to rapidly return which antibiotics could be used to treat a patient with tuberculosis. Genetics-based approaches […]
In this paper, Alice Brankin calculates how different mutations in the DNA gyrase affect the binding of an antibiotic, moxifloxacin, and thereby potentially whether those mutations confer resistance or not. She calculates the relative binding free energy using thermodynamic integration, a method that is derived from classical statistical mechanics. To accompany these results, Philip Fowler, […]