The goal of the Computational Science Lab is to tackle fundamental problems in science in areas of societal importance, by bringing together new kinds of scientists, in a new kind of Laboratory, pioneering new kinds of approaches, new kinds of computational methods, and new kinds of scientific software tools.
Research Groups
Biological Computation Group
The Group is focused on the development and advancement of a new field of Biological Computation, that aims to transform our understanding of biology by considering biological systems as living computation, and to develop the techniques needed to design and program computation in living systems.
Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group
The Group is focused on enabling, making and accelerating fundamental advances in our understanding of, and ability to predict the impact of future changes to, the global climate and ecological systems and processes: Earth’s life support system.
In the News
LATEST: 17 January 2013. Time to model all life on Earth. Paper setting out the scientific and policy making importance of a General Ecosystem Model and our researh into the development of such a model, published in Nature by Drew Purves et al.

11 September 2012. Microsoft and IUCN form unique partnership to tackle species extinction.

- Boyan Yordanov, Christoph Wintersteiger, Youssef Hamadi, Andrew Phillips, and Hillel Kugler, Functional Analysis of Large-scale DNA Strand Displacement Circuits, in DNA 19, Springer, September 2013
- Boyan Yordanov, Christoph M. Wintersteiger, Youssef Hamadi, and Hillel Kugler, Z34Bio: An SMT-based Framework for Analyzing Biological Computation, in SMT'13, July 2013
- Gian Marco Palamara, Gustav W. Delius, Matthew J. Smith, and Owen L. Petchey, Predation effects on mean time to extinction under demographic stochasticity, in Journal of Theoretical Biology, Elsevier, June 2013
- Michael Harfoot, Derek P. Tittensor, Tim Newbold, Greg McInerny, Matthew J. Smith, and Jorn P.W. Scharlemann, Integrated assessment models for ecologists: the present and the future, in Global Ecology and Biogeography, Wiley, June 2013
- Boyan Yordanov, Christoph M. Wintersteiger, Youssef Hamadi, and Hillel Kugler, SMT-based Analysis of Biological Computation, in NASA Formal Methods Symposium 2013, Springer Verlag, May 2013
Biological Computation Group
Head: Andrew Phillips
James Brown
Jonathan Cooper
Neil Dalchau
Sara-Jane Dunn
Alex Fletcher
Hillel Kugler
Chris McEwan
James Osborne
Michael Pedersen
Rasmus Petersen
Fillipo Polo
Boyan Yordanov
Alistair Bailey*
Frits Dannenberg*
Wei Pan*
Laura Parshotam*
Tim Rudge*
Business Administrator: Becky Frost
Computational Science
Microsoft Research
21 Station Road
Cambridge
CB1 2FB
a-refros@microsoft.com
Telephone Number: +44 (0)1223 479 700
Computational Ecology & Environmental Science Group
Head: Drew Purves
Robin Freeman
Mike Harfoot
Lucas Joppa
Vassily Lyutsarev
Greg McInerny
Tim Newbold
Andy Roberts
Matthew Smith
Derek Tittensor
Mark Vanderwel
Sadia Ahmed*
Mindy Siefert*
Ben Dean*
Holly Kirk*
Lara Salido*
Isabel Rosa*
Emily Lines*
Sylvia Caldararu*
Nikee Groot*
*PhD students
- Overview
- Publications
- In the News
- We are currently looking for outstanding scientists both for permanent and post-doctoral positions in the Biological Computation Group and in the Computational Ecology & Environmental Science Group

