Yusuf Abdulle

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 pursuing a PhD in Machine Learning for Health. 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.

I also build open-source tools for clinical data work — see Projects for software like icdlookup, a Python package for ICD-10 code lookup and annotation.

News