About Me

I am Senior Bioinformatician at the Centre for Genomic Pathogen Surveillance, University of Oxford, working with David Aanensen. My work is about building tools and platforms that help public health teams and researchers get real answers from pathogen genome data. I contribute to the CGPS suite of genomic surveillance tools, including Pathogenwatch, used by 14,389 people in 165 countries to interpret pathogen genomes for surveillance and outbreak response, AMRwatch, and [vaccines.watch], which track antimicrobial resistance and vaccine target diversity from growing collections of public genome data.

Before Oxford, I served as Interim Head of Informatics at Quadram Institute Bioscience, where I originally joined as a Bioinformatics Scientific Programmer working with Andrew Page. During the pandemic I led SARS-CoV-2 surge sequencing at Quadram (September 2021 to April 2022), a programme with over £4.5M project value, contributing to the release of more than 80,000 genomes through COG-UK. Earlier I was a Senior Research Fellow with Mark Achtman at the University of Warwick, where I helped build and analyse a collection of 10,000 modern Salmonella enterica genomes and integrated ancient metagenomes into EnteroBase.

My PhD, completed in 2015 under Scott Beatson at the University of Queensland, focused on Escherichia coli virulence and genome comparisons. One output from that period, BRIG (BLAST Ring Image Generator), has since been cited over 3,000 times and remains in active use. I hold dual undergraduate degrees from UQ: a Bachelor of Information Technology and a Bachelor of Science (2008).

My work has 11,687 citations and an h-index of 30. I am an editorial board member of Microbial Genomics, a member of the PHA4GE Infrastructure Working Group, and the founder and administrator of mstdn.science, a Mastodon instance for the scientific community. I also maintain GenomicX, an experiment in running bioinformatics tools entirely in the browser via WebAssembly, with no installation or server uploads required.

ORCID: 0000-0002-1243-0767 (Print-friendly version).