Georgia Elizabeth Whitton

Senior Data Scientist

Georgia is a Data Scientist working in the Genomic Surveillance Unit (GSU). Her interests surround using computational tools on genomic data to impove human health by furthering knowledge of disease . 

Overview

I joined the Sanger Institute in October 2020 as a Data Scientist in what is now known as the Genomic Surveillance Unit (GSU). I initially worked in the Covid-19 genomic surveillance project where I delivered ad hoc analysis tasks to aid in the development and deployment of web applications showcasing the spread of covid lineages across the UK from Sanger’s genomic sequence data.

In 2021 I began working on data analysis and interpretation of Plasmodium falciparum genomics for Malaria. In partnership with MalariaGEN I’m involved in analysis of malaria whole genome data for community data releases sequenced at Sanger, and the bioinformatic implementation and analysis of amplicon data for delivery of timely actionable data to malaria endemic countries.

My overarching goals are to improve and adapt infrastructure to extrapolate information from genomic data, and to deliver this information in clear and conscience messages to partners around the world so that improvements can be made in the control and treatment of Malaria.

Before joining Sanger

Whilst studying for my bachelors at the University of East Anglia, I rapidly developed interest in genomics and the evolving technologies that will undoubtably change the way that we treat disease and improve human health. For my undergraduate thesis I joined the Haerty Group at the Earlham Institute where I developed bioinformatics pipelines to analyse short-read RNA-Seq data from human prefrontal cortex brain tissue to investigate the effects of alternative splicing on voltage gated calcium channel subunits. I was specifically interested in how changes in development and ageing effected the use of exonic segments, and in particularly incidences of schizophrenia.

Following on from the project I was selected for the Genes and Development Summer Studentship 2020 funded by the Genetics Society UK, where I continued to work in the Hearty Group at the Earlham Institute analysing Oxford Nanopore long-read RNA-Seq data to address alternative splicing in neuronal cell differentiation. With a multitude of psychiatric disorders and diseases attributable to mis-splicing it’s increasingly important to use long-read technologies for full transcript recovery to build more accurate transcriptomic annotations.

My timeline

• Senior Data Scientist (Genomic Surveillance) at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

• Junior Data Analyst (Genomic Surveillance) at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

• Completed a Genetics Society Internship in bioinformatics @ Earlham Institute 

• Graduated with first class honours from the University of East Anglia (UEA) with a BSc in Molecular Biology & Genetics 

• Awarded CertHE in Medical Science from Medipathways College, University of Buckingham