Home

Welcome to Chon Lok Lei’s research homepage.

I am a Lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Macau (see my official university page). I completed my D.Phil. (a.k.a. Ph.D.) at the Computational Biology group in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford (see my previous university page), before which I attended training programmes at the Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Oxford, and I received my undergraduate degree in Physics from Imperial College London.

My research interest is in mathematical/computational modelling of biological/physiological systems. I work on human induced pluripotent stem cell-derived cardiomyocyte (hiPSC-CM) electrophysiology and the hERG channel modelling for studying pharmaceutical drug safety. I am also interested in using statistical methods for solving and analysing complex models and dynamical systems, and quantifying the uncertainty in the model parameters and model predictions, as well as model error.

Recently, I begin to deal in studying experimental errors or artefacts, especially when we know the experimental set up is imperfect. Can we quantitatively describe such an experimental error through mathematical modelling? To answer that question, I, together with Gary Mirams, David Gavaghan, Teun de Boer and co., developed a mathematical model describing the experimental artefacts in patch-calmp voltage-clamp experiments. We found that using such a model can account for most of the cell-cell variability that we observed in hERG ion channel kinetics. The voltage clamp experiment model that we developed is also a very useful educational tool. I have created a free online app using the model for understanding (or even to get a feel for) what the amplifier does under the hood: virtual-voltage-clamp.up.railway.app or virtual-voltage-clamp.onrender.com.

See my publications page for my other recent work.