Profile

I grew up in rural Ireland in a place called Donegal which is right beside the sea. I did a PhD in microbial genomics at Maynooth University in Ireland, where I carried out a mix of lab-based biology experiments and computational techniques to decode the genomes of a group of microbes called “Oomycetes” that cause disease in plants and animals. Now, I work at the Earlham Institute as part of the Darwin Tree of Life Project. I am interested in microbiology, genetics and computers. Outside of science, I like running, cooking and travelling. I have a dog called Ozzy.

I am a postdoctoral scientist at the Earlham Institute. I work in the are of “bioinformatics” – which is a mix of biology, computer science, maths and stats. I use bioinformatics to study the genomes (DNA) of tiny single-celled microbes called “protists”. We collect these microbes from the environment in places like ponds, rivers or soil. In the lab, we extract their DNA and sequence it using DNA sequencing machines which generates millions of DNA sequences. My job is to use bioinformatics to work out the order of the DNA sequences to construct their genomes – a bit like a massive jigsaw puzzle with millions of pieces. Once we have their genomes, we can work out which species are related to each other and try to identify genes that may have important functions. Because DNA sequencing generates so much data, we have to use supercomputers to analyse the data.