Doctoral top achiever to aid medical research

Doctoral top achiever to aid medical research

The Auckland University of Technology’s first Top Achiever Doctoral Scholarship winner is helping power New Zealand’s emerging knowledge economy with research he hopes will help to find new ways of fighting disease.

PhD candidate Paulo Gottgtroy is studying at the Knowledge and Engineering Research Discovery Institute (KEDRI), located at AUT’s Technology Park in Penrose.

The scholarship, worth $28,000 per year over three years, was awarded by the Foundation for Research Science and Technology, a government funding body that invests in innovation with a view to fostering the creation of new knowledge.

Paulo Gottgtroy’s research involves building an ontology, or conceptual framework, that makes biomedical knowledge and concepts that are sharable over computer applications and reusable for several purposes.

The ontology will bring together different techniques including statistical analysis, neural networking and ontology to find correlations in the information discovered.

Information collected from clinical patient data, geographical and demographic data, epidemiological data, pharmaceutical, and therapeutic data may be examined to form a clearer picture when correlations between the different types of information are discovered.

“When looked at from one specific research perspective the information may not seem relevant but when it is put together it can help scientists in the process of knowledge discovery.

“Opportunities arise by the simple act of connecting different facts and points of view that have been created for one purpose, but in light of subsequent information, can be reused in a quite different context to form new concepts or hypotheses,” he says. more Paulo Gottgtroy says one of the biggest challenges he faces is building a tool that allows researchers to share their knowledge whilst using it to find new knowledge and relationships between areas that are historically diverse in terms of research and joint projects.

“I would like to create some new methods for the ontology engineering field and to support the biomedical researchers in their challenging job of improving our quality of life.”

Paulo Gottgtroy says after finishing his doctorate he intends to stay on with the KEDRI group and introduce new researchers to share in his dreams of knowledge discovery and knowledge engineering.