About

Hi — I’m Yusuf, a PhD student in the Department of Biostatistics and Health Informatics at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), King’s College London. I’m part of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data-Driven Health, co-funded by LifeArc, and supervised by Prof. Richard Dobson, Prof. Alfredo Iacoangeli, Prof. Honghan Wu, Dr Chris Tomlinson and Dr Zhi Yao.

Research

I build machine-learning systems for rare and neurodegenerative disease, with a focus on Motor Neuron Disease (MND / ALS). The central problem I work on is that rare diseases are where prediction matters most, tasks such as early diagnosis, progression forecasting, subtype discovery, drug repurposing, and also where patient cohorts are smallest, so standard ML tends to fail.

My thesis is aiming to develop an end-to-end pipeline that fuses multimodal electronic health records, biomedical knowledge graphs, genomics to be able to execute on all the aforementioned downstream tasks. More broadly, I’m interested in the methodology that makes small-cohort rare-disease AI trustworthy: knowledge-graph reasoning with LLMs, multimodal representation learning and drug repurposing/target identification.

News

• [April 2026] — The ALS Precision Discovery Consortium team advanced to Round 1 of the Longitude Prize for ALS.
• [April 2026] — Gave a talk at AI meets Knowledge Graphs & Memory on knowledge graphs and LLMs for rare disease.
• [January 2026] — Highlighted in an ALS-TDI blog post covering the International ALS/MND Symposium.
• [December 2025] — Presented at the International Symposium for ALS/MND: Characteristics and Early Diagnosis of Motor Neuron Disease (MND) in 67 million individuals in England.
• [July 2025] — New medRxiv preprint comparing AI-, knowledge-graph–, and MND Association–derived phenotyping for early MND diagnosis across 67 million individuals in England.
• [May 2025] — BioHopR: A Benchmark for Multi-Hop, Multi-Answer Reasoning in the Biomedical Domain accepted to ACL Findings.