30 September 2007 - Bio-informatics post-graduate student among New Zealand’s best

Yingjie Hu has been recognised as being among the top ten per cent of doctoral students in New Zealand, winning a prestigious Top Achiever Doctorate Scholarship.

Press Release
AUT University PhD student Yingjie Hu has been recognised as being among the top ten per cent of doctoral students in New Zealand, winning a prestigious Top Achiever Doctorate Scholarship.

The scholarship, which supports a doctoral candidate over three years, was awarded by the Tertiary Education Commission.

He is one of 28 top doctoral students in the country to be awarded the scholarships for the next three years.

Hu has been granted $94,000 for research on evolving intelligent methods and systems for bioinformatics data analysis. His findings will be applied on problems of cancer diagnosis and prognosis and drug target discovery.

He is currently a PhD student at AUT’s Knowledge Engineering and Discovery Research Institute (KEDRI) under the supervision of Professor Nikola Kasabov. He is the fourth PhD student to have received the Top Achiever Doctorate Scholarship in the intitute.

The purpose of his research is to investigate and develop new information methods for integrated data analysis, modelling and knowledge discovery from bioinformatics data and more specifically from cancer related data. This includes gene expression data, protein data, and clinical data.

Hu says the developed methods will be adaptive, evolving through incremental learning from new data.

Hu received his Master of Computer and Information Sciences degree with honours (first class) from AUT University in 2006.

The aim of the Top Achiever Doctorate Scholarship is to increase the supply of highly trained researchers and highly skilled graduates and give doctoral scholars the choice of studying in New Zealand or at overseas universities.

TEC chief executive Janice Shiner says the scholarships are a real investment in not only the future of these very talented individuals, but also New Zealand’s knowledge economy.

For more information contact:

Yingjie (Raphael) Hu
09 9219578 or rhu@aut.ac.nz

Professor Nikola Kasabov
09 9219506 or nkasabov@aut.ac.nz 

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