Rate My Professor Radu Zabet

Dr. Radu Zabet is a Senior Lecturer in Computational Biology at the Blizard Institute, Centre for Genomics and Child Health, Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London. He obtained his BSc and MSc in Control Systems Engineering from the University Politehnica of Bucharest and completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Kent in 2010, focusing on the physical limits of gene regulatory networks, including noise propagation, response times, and metabolic costs of regulatory architectures. After his PhD, he undertook a short postdoc at the University of Kent with Dr. Tobias von der Haar, developing computational models of translation machinery in yeast cells. In 2011, he received an MRC Training Fellowship in Bioinformatics and joined Dr. Boris Adryan's lab at the Department of Genetics, University of Cambridge, where he investigated the role of transcription factor diffusion—combining 3D diffusion in the nucleus and 1D sliding on DNA—in gene regulation using stochastic simulations. From 2014 to 2015, he moved to Dr. Jerzy Paszkowski’s lab at The Sainsbury Laboratory, Cambridge, researching plant epigenetics and transgenerational stability of DNA methylation patterns, during which he developed the DMRcaller R/Bioconductor package for detecting differentially methylated regions. In September 2015, he established his independent research group at the School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, and relocated the lab to the Blizard Institute in July 2020.

Zabet's interdisciplinary lab combines computational biology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, genomics, and molecular biology to decode the mechanisms of gene regulation, particularly the contributions of transcription factor binding to DNA, 3D chromatin organization, and epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation and histone marks. The group studies these processes in Drosophila melanogaster, mouse, and human systems, with relevance to development and diseases including cancer, and is affiliated with the Centre for Epigenetics. Notable publications include 'The role of insulators and transcription in 3D chromatin organisation of flies' (Chathoth et al., Genome Research, 2022), 'An explainable artificial intelligence approach for decoding the enhancer histone modifications code and identification of novel enhancers in Drosophila' (Wolfe et al., Genome Biology, 2021), 'Chromatin architecture reorganisation during neuronal cell differentiation in Drosophila genome' (Chathoth and Zabet, Genome Research, 2019), 'DMRcaller: a versatile R/Bioconductor package for detection and visualization of differentially methylated regions' (Catoni et al., Nucleic Acids Research, 2018), and 'Characterising sex differences of autosomal DNA methylation in whole blood using the Illumina EPIC array' (Grant et al., Clinical Epigenetics, 2022).