Andrew Teschendorff is a Principal Investigator at the Shanghai Institute of Nutrition and Health, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, leading a lab in Computational Systems Epigenomics, with a research focus on aging and cancer-risk. He trained as a Mathematical Physicist at the University of Edinburgh (1990-1995) where he was mentored by the late Physics Nobel Laureate Peter Higgs, receiving in 1995 the Tait Medal and Robert Schlapp Prize in Physics. Subsequently, he studied Theoretical Physics at Cambridge University (1996-2000), obtaining a Distinction and PhD in Superstring Theory. From 2003 to 2008 he held Cambridge-MIT and Isaac Newton Fellowships in Statistical Cancer Genomics at the University of Cambridge. From 2008 to 2013 he held the Heller Research Fellowship at the UCL Cancer Institute in London. In 2013 he moved to Shanghai where he is currently a PI at the CAS Key Lab of Computational Biology. From 2015 to 2019 he held an Advanced International Newton Fellowship from the Royal Society in association with UCL London. In 2023 he received a prestigious Highly Cited Researcher award from Clarivate in recognition of how his work published in premier journals has influenced the epigenomics, aging and cancer systems biology fields. He holds various patents on algorithms for cancer risk prediction and cell-type deconvolution, is an Associate Editor for Genome Biology and Clinical Epigenetics, and is a regular reviewer and statistical advisor for Nature, Science and other premier journals. His main research accomplishments in Epigenomics and Aging include :
- Identification of the first tissue-independent age-associated DNA methylation signature, a foundational discovery for the epigenetic clock field.
- Identification of a DNAm signature enriched for PRC2 targets that is common to aging and cancer, a key discovery supporting an epigenetic stem-cell model of oncogenesis.
- Inventor of the BMIQ algorithm for normalizing Illumina DNA methylation data, which has been used very extensively in EWAS.
- Co-inventor of the very popular ChAMP Bioconductor package, a pipeline for analysing Illumina DNA methylation data.
- A leader in the development of algorithms for cell-type devonvolution of bulk DNA methylation data, including the popular EpiDISH Bioconductor package.
- Inventor of the EpiSCORE-algorithm and DNAm-atlas encompassing 40 cell-types and 13 tissue-types, enabling cell-type deconvolution in a wide range of tissue-types.
- Inventor of the SCENT and CancerStemID algorithms for detecting stem-cell phenotypes from single-cell omic data, enabling novel single-cell based strategies for early detection and cancer risk prediction.
- Major contributions to the field of epigenetic aging, including the construction of the first epigenetic mitotic clocks, that have significantly improved our understanding of epigenetic clocks and their role in predicting cancer-risk.
