Biography
Dr Lyuba Bozhilova studied Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Oxford. Afterwards, she completed her PhD there as part of the Systems Approaches to Biomedical Science CDT. Her thesis, under the supervision of Professor Gesine Reinert and Professor Charlotte Deane, focussed on the uncertainties and errors associated with protein—protein interaction data and their effect on downstream network analysis. After a short break working in the biotech industry, Lyuba returned to the Department of Statistics at Oxford as a lecturer, where she continued her own research and supervised MSc research projects. She is now based in Professor Patrick Chinnery’s lab, where she develops new methods for analysing mtDNA heteroplasmy data.
Research Interests
Dr Lyuba Bozhilova is broadly interested in the often-ignored uncertainties and biases associated with biomedical data, and how they impact bioinformatics and data analysis pipelines. Her current research focusses on mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA). Wildtype and mutant mtDNA can coexist within the same sample in a state known as heteroplasmy. Lyuba is interested in how we can reliably measure and analyse heteroplasmy changes over time, as well as from mother to offspring. She also has extensive experience in network analysis, working with protein—protein interaction and gene coexpression data.
Selected Publications
Kremer LS*, Bozhilova LV*, Rubalcava-Gracia D, Filograna R, Upadhyay M, Koolmeister C, Chinnery PF, Larsson N-G. (2023)
A role for BCL2L13 and autophagy in germline purifying selection of mtDNA.
PLOS Genetics 19(1): e1010573
*Equal contribution