I am a bioinformatics specialist with a focus on second and third generation sequence analysis and 14 years of experience in barley genomics, variomics and transcriptomics. My post was created at the start of the next generation sequencing era and I am one of the early pioneers of applying these technologies to barley. I was part of the consortia for the barley genome projects in 2012 and 2017 and a co-author on several high-impact publications revolving around the analysis of genetic variation in barley. I was also the lead bioinformatician for the last two barley genotyping platforms, the Illumina iSelect 9k and 50k genotyping chips. I have been involved in the two barley reference transcriptome projects, leading to high-quality barley reference transcript datasets (BART1 and BART2). Other projects I have been involved in include the identification of Rhynchosporium resistance genes, candidate genes for diastatic power and diagnostic markers for epiheterodendrin (EPH).
Over the years I have been involved in a large variety of projects across most of our crop plant species, but most of my research currently relates to barley. My particular interest is in barley variomics and genomics. I have been actively involved in the last two barley genome projects, and also in the development of the last two barley high throughout genotyping platforms. I have an active interest in the quality issues Next Generation Sequencing data and its analysis suffer from, and as part of this I recently supervised a PhD project looking at the generation of false positive SNPs during variant calling. Due to the high demand for bioinformatics analysis skills, I now also spend a substantial amount of my time teaching, supervising and mentoring both staff and students. I have been involved in delivering bioinformatics training courses both internationally and locally, at the James Hutton Institute and University of Dundee.