Simon trained as a molecular biologist, studying signal transduction regulation in Drosophila melanogaster development during his Ph.D. at Leicester University. He made the move in Bioinformatics in 2004 by undertaking a Masters by Research (M.Res.) in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology at the University of Leeds, supported by the BBSRC. Simon CockellGraduating top of his class, with distinction, he moved to Newcastle University to join the nascent Bioinformatics Support Unit in September 2005. His main areas of research interest are:

  • Structure-based approaches to prediction of protein-protein interactions
  • Integration of biological data
  • Analysis of proteomics data
  • High-Throughput Sequencing data analysis, particularly applied techniques such as ChIP-Seq and RNA-Seq

In July 2011, Simon took over from Daniel Swan as the head of the Bioinformatics Support Unit.

To contact Simon, email simon.cockell@newcastle.ac.uk.

Publications

Ka Cheong Lee, Kay Padget, Hannah Curtis, Ian G. Cowell, Davide Moiani, Zbyslaw Sondka, Nicholas J. Morris, Graham H. Jackson, Simon J. Cockell, John A. Tainer, and Caroline A. Austin (2012) MRE11 facilitates the removal of human topoisomerase II complexes from genomic DNA. Biology Open; Advance Online Publication July 16, 2012. doi:10.1242/bio.20121834.

Jochen Weile, Katherine James, Jennifer Hallinan, Simon J Cockell, Phillip Lord, Anil Wipat and Darren Wilkinson (2012) Bayesian integration of networks without gold standards. Bioinformatics 28(11) 1495-1500. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/bts154.

Laurence D Parnell, Pierre Lindenbaum, Khader Shameer, Giovanni Marco Dall’Olio, Daniel C. Swan, Lars Juhl Jensen, Simon J. Cockell, Brent S Pedersen, Mary E. Mangan, Christopher A. Miller, Istvan Albert (2011) BioStar: An Online Question & Answer Resource for the Bioinformatics Community. PLoS Comput Biol 7(10): e1002216. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002216.

Stadler L, Hoffmann T, Tomlinson D, Song Q, Lee T, Busby M, Nyathi Y, Gendra E, Tiede C, Flanagan K, Cockell SJ, Wipat A, Harwood C, Wagner S, Knowles M, Davis J, Ko Ferrigno P (2011) Structure-function studies of an engineered scaffold protein derived from Stefin A. II: Development and Applications of the SQT variant Protein Engineering Design and Selection 24(9): 751-63 doi: 10.1093/protein/gzr019.

Weile J, Pocock M, Cockell SJ, Lord P, Dewar JM, Holstein E, Wilkinson D, Lydall D, Hallinan J, Wipat A. Customisable views on semantically integrated networks for systems biology Bioinformatics first published online March 16, 2011 doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btr134 PubMed

Simon J Cockell, Jochen Weile, Phillip Lord, Claire Wipat, Dmytro Andriychenko, Matthew Pocock, Darren Wilkinson, Malcolm Young and Anil Wipat (2010) An integrated dataset for in silico drug discovery. Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics 7(3):116. PubMed

Christine Hoogland, Martin O’Gorman, Philippe Bogard, Frank Gibson, Matthias Berth, Simon J Cockell, Andreas Ekefjärd, Ola Forsstrom-Olsson, Anna Kapferer, Mattias Nilsson, Salvador Martínez-Bartolomé, Juan Pablo Albar, Sira Echevarría-Zomeño, Montserrat Martínez-Gomariz, Johann Joets, Pierre-Alain Binz, Chris F Taylor, Andrew Dowsey, Andrew R Jones. (2010) Guidelines for reporting the use of gel image informatics in proteomics. Nature Biotechnology 28:655-6 PubMed.

Kaveh Emami, Nicholas J. Morris, Simon J. Cockell, Gabriela Golebiowska, Qing-Yao Shu, Angharad M.R. Gatehouse (2010) Changes in Protein Expression Profiles Between a Low Phytic Acid Rice (Oryza sativa L. ssp. japonica) Line and its Parental Line: A Proteomic and Bioinformatic Approach. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry 58(11):6912-22 PubMed

S.J. Cockell, B. Oliva, and R. M. Jackson. (2007)  Evaluating in silico predictions of protein-protein interactions using Comparative Docking Bioinformatics 23, 573-581  Pubmed

Conferences

Phillip Lord, Simon Cockell, Robert Stevens. Three Steps to Heaven. Sepublica Workshop at 9th Extended Semantic Web Conference 2012 (May 27th-31st, 2012) – awarded ‘best paper’.

Simon J Cockell, Jochen Weile, Phillip Lord, Claire Wipat, Dmytro Andriychenko, Matthew Pocock, Darren Wilkinson, Malcolm Young and Anil Wipat. An Ondex dataset for in silico drug discovery. Poster at 4th Annual BBSRC Systems Biology Grant Holders’ Workshop, Edinburgh, UK.

Catherine Canevet, Keywan Hassani-Pak, Simon J Cockell and Matthew Pocock. ONDEX – Data Integration and Visualisation. Workshop at BioSysBio 2009, Cambridge, UK.

Simon J Cockell, Matthew Pocock, Catherine Canevet, James Dewar, Eva Holstein, Steve Addinall, Phillip Lord, David Lydall, Darren Wilkindon and Anil Wipat. Exploring Yeast Telomere Maintenance Using Ondex. Poster at 3rd Annual BBSRC Systems Biology Grant Holders’ Workshop, Nottingham, UK.