Profile
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Kerstin Howe
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About Me:
I’m fascinated by how life works and love investigating and bringing order to data. Working in bioinformatics dealing with genome data is therefore more a hobby than a job!
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I live in Cambridge with my two daughters and our hamster. I love pottering around in the garden, reading anything I find, hiking with friends and singing in a chamber choir. I also like nerding about science fiction, fantasy and linguistics.
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My Work:
Using computing to make sense of genome sequence data.
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I have always been interested in how living things work, but also love my numbers, so I studied maths (a bit) and biology (a lot). After working in a genetics lab for a long time to get a PhD, I had enough of all that lab mess (I hate cooking so should have gotten the hint earlier) and turned to (bio)informatics, loving to see how all my efforts there were rewarded with shiny new data and a deeper understanding of how everything fits together. Working with genome sequencing data trying to assemble it into chromosomes, I realised pretty early on that if you don’t get your genome assemblies right, all the other research based on them will make lots of mistakes, so I tried to find new ways of making genome assemblies perfect.
Many years later I now have a highly successful team of 11 people working on exactly this for many big international projects. These projects hand over their genome assemblies to us and we take them and correct all the errors that are still in there (and there still are a lot) and make beautiful chromosome assemblies for all those animals, plants and fungi that can then be used by all the scientists out there.
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My Typical Day:
Since I’m a team manager, I spend most of my time in meetings, finding out how things are going and planning what to do next. I also talk to the people in my team a lot to make sure everyone is okay and gets on well with their projects.
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My days are mostly spent in meetings and in front of a computer. Since we are running massive projects, we have lots of meetings to make sure everyone knows exactly what happens, what they need to do and where they find everything they need to do it. When I am not in meetings, I spend a lot of my time emailing people to get and send data and agree on ways of handling things. I also spend some time writing scripts to deal with genome data to find out what’s in that data.
All data that we are producing is made public online so that everyone can find and use it for their research. Once we find something new and amazing we write a report on it and that is published in scientific magazines or on the internet so that all other scientists and everyone interested can find out about it.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
Working for the Tree of Life programme at the Sanger that sequences the genomes of all life on the British Isles, I would like to make sure that the successes of this project are being made known to local people around me.
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Education:
I went to school and university in Germany.
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Qualifications:
German equivalent to International Baccalaureate, German equivalent to combined BSc/MSc in biology, PhD in genetics at Bochum university, Germany.
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Work History:
I jobbed in a hospital’s operation theatre during university. After my masters I worked as a project manager for an engineering company. After my PhD I started at the Sanger Institute as a computer biologist annotating genes in the human genome, then moved to be a programmer for the wormbase project. I then became the project manager for the analysis and production of the zebrafish genome assembly and then the scientific manager for a team checking and improving genome assemblies, all at Sanger.
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Current Job:
I lead a team at the Sanger Institute that makes sure all genome sequence assemblies are the best they could be. We analyse the assemblies, identify mistakes and fix them and release them to the public. Our team is called GRIT (for Genome Reference Informatics Team).
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My Interview
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What did you want to be after you left school?
First an astronaut, then a linguist, a surgeon, a mathematician and then a biologist.
Were you ever in trouble at school?
I think I talked too much.
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Florence & the machine
What's your favourite food?
A bowl of berries, any kind.
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
Someone inventing beaming so that I can easily visit friends and family in Germany, having a great singing voice and having someone renovating my house.
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