Regular biography
Alexander Maxwell Tanaka is a Research Fellow in the Department of MATH at the University of Oxford. His research interests include drug discovery, geometric and topological machine learning, piecewise-linear Morse theory, shape analysis, and topological data analysis (TDA). Tanaka is currently working on characterising simplicial complexes using a novel transform inspired by piecewise-linear Morse theory, with applications in ligand-based virtual screening of drug candidates. He is supervised by Prof. Vidit Nanda and Dr Aras T. Asaad at the Oxford Drug Design group and is funded by the EPSRC SABS:R 3 Centre for Doctoral Training. Tanaka holds a bachelor's and master's degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, where his master's thesis investigated the effect of the physics of the common-envelope-evolution phase on the rate of merging neutron stars, leading to a publication.