Dr Joshua C. Randall

Senior Scientific Manager

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

Joshua leads the Human Genetics Informatics team, who are responsible for handling the informatics needs of the Human Genetics research programme, including processing of large-scale genetics and genomics data sets. He holds an S.B in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from MIT and a D.Phil in Statistical Genetics from the University of Oxford and is passionate about data sharing and free open source software.

I believe the best informatics teams are comprised of skilled software developers who have developed an interest in the domain area, and that each individual’s role should involve both data production and software development. Having software developers who are responsible for bioinformatics data production and bioinformaticians who are responsible for writing software means that we are all in a position to be motivated to automate our way out of manual work whenever possible. Automated computational workflows are less prone to error than human mediated data processing and are much more scalable.

We develop tools to assist with the management and operation of computational pipelines, and we generally do this development in the open on public github repositories and make it available under free and open-source software licenses. The types of projects that we contribute to includes software for NGS data processing and analysis, workflow management infrastructure, tools for storage and quota management and reporting, and internal web interfaces and backend infrastructure to interact with our services.

My timeline

• Became chair of Technical Infrastucture Working Group, MRC Uganda Medical Informatics Centre (Entebbe, Uganda)

• Submitted D.Phil thesis (Large-scale genetic analysis of quantitative traits)

• Started at the Sanger Institute as Senior Scientific Manager - Human Genetics Informatics

• Matriculated at University of Oxford to begin a D.Phil in Statistical Genetics supervised by Dr. Cecilia Lindgren and Prof. Chris Holmes

• Started as a research assistant with Dr. Cecilia Lindgren at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (Oxford)

• Les Prix de l'Innovation, France Télécom 2004, nomination pour le Prix Spécial de la R&D

• Graduated from MIT with S.B. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science

• Started as a Senior Research Specialist at France Telecom R&D (Cambridge, MA, USA)

• First employee at a start-up company called MessageMachines at which I co-developed the core technology, an advanced platform for seamless cross-device and cross-carrier messaging (Boston, MA, USA)

• Undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab, working on community messaging systems for group collaboration

• Matriculated as an undergraduate at MIT (Cambridge, MA, USA)

• Graduated from high school (Longmeadow, MA, USA)

• Attained the rank of Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America