Research Scientist
Feng brings over a decade of experience working with C. elegans to model human disease, with expertise in high-throughput screening, molecular biology, microbiology, NGS, and bioinformatics. He has contributed to research spanning neurodegeneration, ageing, microbiome interactions, genetic variation, and cancer signalling.
His PhD in Systems Biology at the University of Manchester involved using high-throughput liquid screening methods to probe the effects of natural genetic variation on cancer signalling and population fitness, alongside developing pipelines for data processing and statistical analyses. As a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, he identified novel protective genes against dopaminergic neurodegeneration through EMS mutagenesis screens with high-throughput worm sorting and mapping causal neuroprotective mutations using custom pipelines and tools he helped develop for bulked segregant WGS approaches.
Shifting fields, he explored the benefits of commercially available probiotics on α-synuclein aggregation in a Parkinson’s disease model. Successes led to a PDUK-funded project on exploring the effects of human gut microbiota on α-synuclein aggregation and stress response pathways. As a research associate at the University of Kent, he characterised natural microbiota that protected against amyloid-β proteotoxicity in an Alzheimer’s disease model. Bacterial libraries were generated using transposon-insertion mutagenesis and fed to worms to screen for the causal bacterial component.
At Magnitude, Feng applies his broad technical and research background to develop bespoke in vivo screening approaches tailored to client needs.