William Duddy PhD

William Duddy is a Lecturer in Stratified Medicine at the Northern Ireland Centre for Stratified Medicine-Ulster University. He is part of the Duguez neuromuscular lab. He pursue bioinformatics approaches to develop personalized therapies and diagnostic tools, with a focus on neuromuscular pathologies. Previously, as project leader in bioinformatics at the Center of Research in Myology, He developed and applied data mining and systems biology approaches to muscle disease, especially for functional analyses of omics data. He has also been involved in the in-silico design of exon skipping oligonucleotides for genetic diseases such as Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD), and of novel truncated dystrophin proteins for DMD gene therapy. His Ph.D. was on computational analyses of protein and protein::ligand interaction geometry, during which he learned various large data analytical techniques and programming. He then did wet-lab systems biology research at the Department of Integrative Systems Biology at Children's National Medical Center, where he ran transcriptome, proteome, and secretome analyses on cell and mouse models of muscle disease, as well as studied muscle stem cell behavior. In neuromuscular disorders he is motivated by his personal background, having had a brother with DMD.