Georgia Elizabeth Whitton

Junior Genomic Surveillance Data Analyst

Georgia is a junior data analyst currently working in the Covid-19 genomic surveillance project. Her interests surround using computational tools to help improve human health by furthering knowledge of disease.

I joined the Sanger Institute in October 2020 as a Junior Genomic Surveillance Data Analyst in the Parasites and Microbes department. I’m currently working in the data analytics group of the Covid-19 genomics surveillance project where I’m helping to combine genomic data with important metadata to help track the spread of Covid-19 through the UK.

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. After presenting my research at their virtual conference I was awarded second place.

My timeline

• Started role as a Junior Data Analyst (Genomic Surveillance ) at the Wellcome Sanger Institute

• Completed a Genetics Society Internship in bioinformatics at the Earlham Institute in the Haerty Group and in collaboration with Prof Elizabeth Tunbridge's Group at the University of Oxford

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

• Started Undergradute Theisis at the Earlham Institute under the supervison of Dr Wilfried Haerty

• Commenced Undergraduate Study at the University of East Anglia

• Awarded a CertHE in Medical Science by the University of Buckingham