
Alumni
This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.
I have been employed by the Wellcome Sanger Institute from December 2009 until September 2021. My main role was the development and maintenance of software that supported the creation of the PlasmoGEM resource of gene modification vectors for malaria parasites. I have also provided general bioinformatics support to my lab group and have been an active member of the public outreach community at the institute.
From October 2020, I started to work for the COG UK Covid19 genome sequencing consortium with Public Health England. From October 2021, I will be working full time with PHE/HSA-UK.
My main project is the development of the software tools and web portal supporting PlasmoGEM - a genome-wide resource of gene modification vectors. The software is used to automate the gene modification design process, track constructs though the wet lab pipeline and analyse deep-sequencing data for quality control purposes. In addition, I provide bioinformatics support for various projects in the lab, including transcriptomics and proteomics assays.
I obtained a PhD in plant virology at the University of Hamburg (Germany) in 2002 before joining the lab of David Baulcombe at the Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich (UK), working on the mechanisms of small-RNA-mediated anti-viral gene silencing. With the advent of next-generation sequencing, I shifted my focus to the computational analysis of high-throughput sequence data. I continued this work at the University of East Anglia, developing a collection of web-based tools for the analysis of large-scale small RNA data. In December 2009, I joined the Billker lab to support the PlasmoGEM team.