Profile

I grew up and live in Cambridge with my young family. We have a 5 year old son and a large black cat named spook (we believe he is an F5 bengal breed). I am a member of the parish council in my village and enjoy getting involved in village life. And I am interested in traditional Irish music, playing the concertina, button accordion and uilleann pipes (I play the bag pipes very badly!). I also dabble a little with flamenco guitar. I am a little bit obsessed with computers, gadgets and technology. I love finding neat solutions to scientific problems.

I co-run a research group with the Director at EMBL-EBI. We have a broad range of research activities, including large scale genomic analysis using “big data” projects such as the UK Biobank, the use of electronic health care records combined with cutting edge machine learning methods to improve patient care in the UK, super resolution microscopy techniques coupled with computer science based methods for efficient search across large search spaces, the use of Nanopore sequencing technologies for a range of novel scientific exploration, the analysis of virus integration characteristics and its effect on host genomes, the use of a novel panel of inbred Medaka fish to explore genetic, genetic and environmental (GxE) effects to understand basic biology and fundamental genetic principles. I run the research on the ground and co-supervise PhD students / postdocs (the people who do all the work!), I enjoy discussing and providing advise wherever i can.

My typical day involves making sure that all individuals and projects in the group have what they require to work, this involves a certain degree of administration (boring but necessary) and technological / method development (fun!). After this is complete, I tend to spend my time exploring news ideas and methods that might be useful to individuals and projects happening in the group, i enjoying discussing with other group members and bouncing ideas around for new directions of research. One major part of work is document writing and the review of manuscripts, although very important, in truth this is an area i do not enjoy as much as method generation / implementation (coding!).