Biography

I am interested using data science techniques on biological data. Though I am not a computational scientist or a mathematician by training, I enjoy learning about these subjects and bringing useful techniques from these fields to aid with biological questions.

I undertook a MSci course in Genetics as the University of Manchester. The masters portion of which was in a computational lab with Professor Simon Hubbard where I learned coding techniques and how to work with transcriptomic data. I also had a summer placement during my undergrad with a computational team at the Babraham Institute. I completed my MSci in 2017.

I then continued my training as a computational biologist by joining a PhD programme supervised by Daryl Shanley at Newcastle University. I honed my programming skills and ventured into software development and machine learning. I also gained training in systems biology and how to work with multi- omic datasets. I completed my PhD at the end of 2021.

As of December 2021, I joined the WCMR under the ICGNMD (international Center for Genomic Medicine in Neuromuscular Disease). Here I will work as a bioinformatician for both the ICGNMD and the WCMR.

Research Focus

I support researchers and clinicians funded by the ICGNMD grant here in Newcastle and other sites such as UCL and centers in South Africa. My support includes processing large quantities of whole exome sequencing data and developing bespoke pipelines for the analysis of copy number variations, structural variations and de novo mutations.

Though I work for the ICGNMD grant, I am situated at the WCMR, and so I also work with researchers here on their projects. This includes setting up a copy number variation pipeline for undiagnosed cases at the WCMR, de- bugging processing pipelines set up by previous bioinformaticians and helping colleagues with scripting issues.

Sponsor/Funder: ICGNMD