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Professor Conrad Bessant

Conrad

Professor of Bioinformatics

Email: c.bessant@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: Third Floor, Empire House (Whitechapel Campus)
Website: https://bezzlab.github.io/

Profile

Conrad Bessant has over 20 years’ experience of data science, tackling research questions in analytical chemistry, biomolecular science, and qualitative healthcare studies.

His overarching research interest is the automation of scientific discovery in the biomedical domain. While some aspects of biomedical research such as data acquisition and routine analysis are already commonly automated, fundamental research activities such as hypothesis generation, identification of relevant datasets and interpretation of results still require extensive input from human experts. This is becoming increasingly intractable as available datasets grow in size and complexity – innovative solutions to automate the process are needed.

Technologies being used by Conrad’s research group to automate the scientific discovery process include machine learning, logic modelling, network science and Bayesian inference.

Conrad is based in QMUL’s Digital Environment Research Institute and is a fellow of the Alan Turing Institute. He leads QMUL’s MSc Bioinformatics programme and is the academic lead of the UKRI AI for Drug Discovery Doctoral Training Programme.

Undergraduate Teaching

  • Essential Skills for Biochemists (Tutorials) (BIO101)
  • Biomedical Sciences Research Project (BMD600)

Postgraduate Teaching

Teaching on our Bioinformatics MSc

  • AI and Data Science in Biology (BIO720P)
  • Bioinformatics Software Development Group Project (BIO727P)
  • Bioinformatics research project (BIO702P)

Research

Research Interests:

The scientifically rigorous use of machine learning to address bio/medical research questions is central to Conrad’s work. He pioneered machine learning applications in electroanalytical chemistry (Bessant & Saini, 1999) before transitioning to biology, where he has applied these approaches across fundamental biology, cancer research, and medical diagnostics (e.g., Dunkley et al., 2006; Hijazi et al., 2020; Saihi et al., 2023). More recently, his work focuses on applying AI to drug discovery and patient experience research (e.g., Branson et al., 2025; Byrom et al., 2023).

Conrad has collaborated extensively with industry, particularly in the pharmaceutical sector, and currently serves as academic lead of the UKRI-BBSRC AI for Drug Discovery Collaborative Training Partnership, an industry-focused doctoral programme comprising 27 doctoral students. He is also a co-founder of Mebomine Ltd, a Queen Mary spinout.

His group is part of the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences (SBBS) and is physically based at the Digital Environment Research Institute (DERI) in Whitechapel, London.

Centre for Evolutionary and Functional Genomics

Centre for Molecular Cell Biology

 

 

Publications

 

Supervision

Current PhD opportunities

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