Staff Profile

I am a research cancer geneticist, specialising in technology development and bioinformatics methods development. My current work involves harnessing 3rd generation Nanopore sequencing, and hybrid sequencing technologies, to better understand the role of repetitive DNA in cancer.

I am currently focused on exploring the genomic landscape of childhood cancer and leukaemia, to improve the risk-stratification of patients for treatment and provide a greater understanding of disease development and prevention in children. I am working with Dr. Sarra Ryan to develop novel analysis techniques for hybrid sequencing data to explore genetic variation within highly repetitive DNA sequences. The aim of this work is to explore genomic 'dark matter' - the highly repetitive regions of the genome which make up the centromeres and telomeres - to determine their role in chromosomal stability and tumourigenesis.