Prof. Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova: “Integrating Microbiomes in the Context of Lung Disease”

Abstract

Studies have shown that airway composition of microbes relates to diseases. The advent of microbial genomics has enabled the comprehensive characterization of diverse bacteria, fungi and virus found in the airway. While bacteria, fungi and viruses coexist as communities in the airway, most microbiome studies involve singular analysis of bacteria, fungi or viruses in isolation. Here we integrate multi-microbiomes from same samples for the first time using a similarity network fusion strategy. This holistic approach identifies clinically relevant high and low-risk clusters with greater precision. Subsequent weighted ensemble-based co-occurrence analysis between clusters shows that “interactions” between microbes are of equal if not of greater importance than individual microbes, promoting the concept of community as pathogens rather than individual microbes.

Curriculum Vitae

Krasimira Tsaneva-Atanasova earned her undergraduate and MSc degrees in mathematics at the University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria from 1991 until 1996. In September 2001 she started a PhD in applied mathematics at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. After completing her PhD in October 2004 she spent 18 months as a post-doctoral fellow at the Laboratory of Biological Modelling, National Institutes of Health, USA and another 15 months as a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Biology at Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, France. She joined the Department of Engineering Mathematics at the University of Bristol in October 2007 as a lecturer and was promoted to a Reader in Applied Mathematics in 2012. She moved to the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter (UoE) in July 2013 where she is currently a Professor of Mathematics for Healthcare.

Prof. Tsaneva-Atanasova (h=29, ±2472 citations) has substantial experience of leading and managing large, multidisciplinary, research projects tackling biomedical and healthcare challenges. She is Associate Dean for Global in the College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, Director of the recently awarded Hub for quantitative Modelling in Healthcare (EP/T017856/1, 2021-2015), Co-director of the University of Exeter ISSF (a £4.8M initiative between UoE and the Wellcome Trust) and an Alan Turing Institute Fellow since October 2018. Her research and professional activities aim to inform novel applications of mathematics to enable the development of quantitative methods for healthcare and healthcare technologies. In her research, she develops and analyses mathematical models for applications to personalised prediction and clinical decision support in prevention, diagnosis or treatment of health-related conditions. Her international reputation in this field is evidenced through regular invitations to meetings such as SIAM DS, ECMTB, Equadiff, ICIAM, and awards like the prestigious Technical University of Munich (TUM) Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) Hans Fischer Senior Fellowship, a 3-year programme of research on Transient Emergent Network Dynamics (since April 2019). She is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications (since 2020) and is regularly invited to assesses UK and international research activity at the interface between mathematics and medicine.