CoMPLEX PhD student wins Postgraduate Taught Prize

Chris Banerji, CoMPLEX PhD student with UCL-CS and the Cancer Institute has won the Faculty Postgraduate Taught Prize for 2012. The prize was awarded to Chris for his impressive work in his MRes in Modelling Biological Complexity during the last academic session.

Director of CoMPLEX, Dr Guy Moss, observed that:“Chris Banerji is, simply put, a totally exceptional student. Chris came to us having received a 1st Class MMath degree from Oxford. In his three short projects during the MRes year he averaged a mark of 91%, never falling below 88% from any marker. He then went on to attain a summer project mark of 93%. In a programme where marks of 80% or above are very rare, these high marks single him out as having put together a set of truly brilliant performances. Indeed, from his MRes work he has almost enough material for two full papers and has already prepared one of these!”.

In his response to being awarded the prize, Chris stated: ‘Given the very high calibre of research within the MAPS faculty, it is both a great honour and quite a surprise to find myself in receipt of this prize. One of the great joys of working in a field such as mathematical biology comes from its focus on collaboration, thus I cannot take all the credit for the work produced in my MRes and must thank (among others) Simone Severini, Andrew Teschendorff, Peter Zammit and Richard Orrell for all their support Our work last year shone a light on the most prevalent skeletal myopathy (FSHD). We are now beginning to utilise this new knowledge in the lab; with luck we may one day see the first therapies for FSHD”.