I am a postdoctoral bioinformatics researcher in the Tree of Life programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and a visiting postdoctoral fellow at EMBL-EBI.
My work focuses on building computational models to learn how interactions between selective forces and molecular processes impact the evolution of coding sequences and genome structure. To what extent is sequence evolution driven by functional constraints? Which changes are deleterious or adaptive? How can we extract this information at high resolution for hundreds of genomes across the tree of life?
Recent and ongoing projects include: (1) Examining patterns of genome rearrangement and rates of sequence evolution in ~500 butterflies and moths. (2) Building tools to disentangle genomes from different sources in sequencing samples to accelerate genome assembly, and reveal interactions between species and their cobionts through time (this work explores how neural nets and image processing techniques can be adapted to biological questions).
To address rhese questions, I make use of phylogenetic modelling approaches and unsupervised machine learning.
I previously completed my PhD on “Genome structure and determinants of rates of evolution” in the group of Laurence Hurst at the University of Bath (UK), before moving to Uppsala University (Sweden), where I contributed to the Avian Phylogenomics Project, and later Temple University (USA), where I worked on modelling protein evolution. In addition to doing research in genomics, I am a member of the Earth BioGenome Project’s Justice Equity Diversity and Inclusion committee, as well as the Tree of Sex Project’s Ethics and Inclusivity working group.