Jacqueline Marcia Boccacino
PhD Student
Career
Undergraduate studies
Jacqueline obtained a B.Sc. degree in Molecular Sciences from the University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil, in 2022. During her undergrad, she undertook a research internship in the Laboratory of Neurobiology and Stem Cells of USP’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, under the supervision of Dr. Marilene Hohmuth Lopes. Jacqueline’s research focused on the most aggressive form of brain cancer, glioblastoma, aiming to understand the role of the cellular prion protein, the physiological isoform of infectious prions, in the biology of this malignancy by leveraging publicly available RNA sequencing datasets generated from patient-derived samples. She also provided bioinformatics support and contributed to other projects in the lab, including the investigation of how the co-chaperone stress-inducible protein 1 may contribute to embryonic development in mammals.
Sanger Prize internship
Jacqueline was the winner of the Sanger Prize 2021 and joined the Wellcome Sanger Institute for the first time as a visiting researcher in Dr. Sarah Teichmann’s lab in the Cellular Genomics Programme (CellGen), back in 2022. During her internship in the Teichmann Lab, she worked with Dr. Rik Lindeboom on the COVID-19 Human Challenge Study, aiming to characterise the adaptive immune response against SARS-CoV-2 throughout the course of a COVID-19 infection. Check out the paper that reports the findings of the COVID-19 Human Challenge Study here.
Work experience
After the end of her Sanger Prize internship, Jacqueline went back to Brazil to spend some time with her family, and she then returned to Sanger in October 2022 to work as a bioinformatician in Dr. David Adams’ Somatic Functional Genomics and Cancer group, based in the Somatic Genomics Programme (SGP). She worked as part of DERMATLAS, a large project whose goal is the assembly of a comprehensive genomic atlas of dozens of skin tumour subtypes. Jacqueline not only contributed to the quality control and analysis of next-generation sequencing data but also developed and maintained pipelines for the project.
PhD at Sanger
After a very fulfilling journey working as a bioinformatician for a year, Jacqueline started pursuing a doctoral degree at Sanger and the University of Cambridge. Under the supervision of Dr. David Adams and Professor Muzlifah Haniffa, Jacqueline’s PhD focuses on dissecting the cellular and spatial landscape of skin cancers to understand how they develop and metastasise. In particular, she is using scRNA-seq and spatial transcriptomics to study cutaneous basal cell carcinoma and sebaceous gland carcinoma.
My timeline
PhD student, University of Cambridge & Wellcome Sanger Institute (October 2023 - present)
Bioinformatician, Experimental Cancer Genetics Group, Wellcome Sanger Institute (October 2022 - September 2023)
BSc in Molecular Sciences, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil (August 2022)
Visiting researcher, Teichmann Lab, Wellcome Sanger Institute (April 2022 - July 2022)
Sanger Prize winner (May 2021)
Research student, Laboratory of Neurobiology and Stem Cells, University of São Paulo (USP), Brazil (January 2020 - July 2022)