Biography
Weiwei studied for his DPhil in Physical and Theoretical Chemistry at the University of Oxford under the supervision of Prof. Claire Vallance. His DPhil research focused on ionization and fragmentation dynamics of singly and multiply charged gas-phase molecules of interest in velocity-map imaging experiments. He developed an on-the-fly ab initio trajectory simulation strategy to reveal key factors affecting products of femtosecond-laser-pulse-induced Coulomb explosion experiments and to extract quantitative information on time-evolving molecular structures. After completing his DPhil in 2018, he moved to the National Physical Laboratory as a Higher Research Scientist, during which time his main research interests centred around developing and applying computational methods for analyzing high-dimensional and high-throughput mass spectrometry imaging (MSI) data. To harmonize the relationship between experimentalists and computationalists in the group, he also developed several handy packages, such as a synthetic MSI data generator and a multi-modal MSI data acquisition control interface. In January 2025, he joined the MRC Toxicology Unit as a bioinformatician at the Bioinformatics Core Facility.
Weiwei has been actively participating in science outreach. He hosted two consecutive NPL Academy outreach projects in 2023 and 2024. He also helped run outreach programmes for the Department of Chemistry while pursuing his DPhil at Oxford.
Research Interests
As part of the Bioinformatics Core Facility team at MRC Toxicology Unit, Weiwei enjoys working on various inspirational and challenging projects, such as the analysis of thermal proteome profiles, quality control in tissue microarray data, and evaluation of batch effects correction algorithms. Aside from his intrinsic curiosity in molecular dynamics simulations, Weiwei is particularly interested in exploring the application of novel machine learning methods in modalities and data types beyond the norm. Weiwei is a pragmatic advocate of Bayesian statistics.
