Dr Paul Ashford Research Software Engineer
Paul has extensive software development and database design expertise with a research background in structural biology, cancer genomics, and network analysis.
Contact details
Role
Paul Ashford (Ash) joined the Research Software Engineering (RSE) facility in October 2025.
Ash gained experience in software engineering through contributions to a wide range of projects in both industry and academic research roles.
He has published articles in the fields of structural biology, cancer genomics and virology that involved creation of novel bioinformatics methods, design of supporting databases, and application of techniques from evolutionary biology and biological network analysis.
Ash has expertise with multiple relational database management systems, including MySQL, Oracle, and SQL Server, having designed, implemented and maintained multiple databases.
He has programming experience in R, SQL, Python, MATLAB, Perl, and Java and has implemented pipelines for scientific workflows using NextFlow, Unix shell scripts, and related scripting tools such as sed and AWK.
Research
- Bioinformatics (structural biology and biological network analysis)
- Molecular biology (evolutionary genetics and cancer genomics)
- Ecology and evolution (computational methods)
- Drug discovery (protein-ligand studies, molecular simulation)
- Astronomy and astrophysics
Publications
Career
Ash was a Research Associate in the Orengo group at UCL, London, from 2014 to 2025. As part of the CATH (Class, Architecture, Topology and Homologous superfamily) protein structure and function database team, he was primarily involved in long-term collaborations with cancer research groups at UCL and the Francis Crick Institute. He developed bioinformatics tools for mutation structure-function impact prediction and protein-protein interaction network analysis. He also co-supervised and supported multiple research students in the group.
Ash previously worked as a postdoc with Prof Maya Topf at Birkbeck, University of London, helping develop a protein interaction database for herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1).
Prior to his PhD, Ash worked professionally across public, private, and charity sectors as a software developer and database administrator.
Education
Ash holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from Birkbeck, University of London. His PhD research explored ways of analysing and visualising sites of transient drug binding pockets that can occur at protein-protein interfaces, using methods from structural biology, molecular simulations, and homology searching.