Chris Foley PhD

Dr Chris Foley is Chief Data Scientist at BioXcelerate. Chris received a First in Mathematics from the University of St Andrews, an MSc with Distinction and the annual Prize in Statistics from the University of Manchester and a PhD in Mathematics from the University of Edinburgh (2013). He was a awarded a National Institute of Health Research Fellowship in 2014 and was a research fellow at the University of Cambridge (Cardiovascular Epidemiology Unit and MRC Biostatistics Unit from 2015-2021) where he specialized in the development of customised machine learning (ML) tools, to better understand the genetic basis of disease (largely cardiovascular disease) and help pinpoint candidate genetic drug targets. 

Chris has internationally recognized expertise in the areas of causal inference, human genetic studies, causal gene identification and disease clustering. He has developed multiple, popular open-source ML software packages, published research in the world’s top journals – both health research (e.g., Nature) and in the production of cutting-edge ML methodologies (e.g., NeurIPS). One highlight of Chris’ career to date was to prove, for the first time, that leading-edge AI tools can be trained to solve Isaac Newton’s equations of motion – thus helping to address a problem that has confounded mathematicians and physicists for the last 300 years.

Chris regularly collaborates and works alongside diverse teams of biological and computational scientists to successfully meet and deliver on scientific goals. Notably, Chris has ongoing collaborations with members of the Translational Genetics team at Biogen, resulting in successful contributions to the team’s research output.