Nick Loman
Academic Lead
Nick Loman is a Professor of Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics at the University of Birmingham. His research focuses on cutting-edge genomics and metagenomics approaches for diagnosing, treating, and monitoring infectious diseases. He has investigated outbreaks of Gram-negative multi-drug-resistant pathogens and explores genetic diversity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa infections to develop diagnostic and prognostic markers. His goal is to develop bioinformatics tools for interpreting genome and metagenome-scale data in clinical practice.
Andrea Telatin
Grant Holder
Andrea Telatin is the Head of Bioinformatics at the Quadram Institute Bioscience, where he specializes in reproducible pipelines and microbial (meta)genomics data analysis. With a PhD in Biochemistry and Biotechnology, he has been a pioneer in applying bioinformatics to Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and leads a skilled team supporting cutting-edge research and global collaborations.
Tom Connor
Co-Investigator
Tom is a Professor at Cardiff University. He is a Big Data Biologist who has a background in the population genomics and molecular epidemiology of pathogenic bacteria. He obtained his PhD at Imperial, and was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute from 2010 to 2012.
Christopher Quince
Co-Investigator
Chris comes from a physical-sciences background, with a PhD in theoretical physics. In recent years he has successfully turned his attention to bioinformatics problems in sequence-based analyses of microbial communities, with two highly cited papers on removing noise from pyrosequenced amplicons. He held a five-year EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellowship (2009-2014) entitled ‘Pioneering the new genomics era in environmental microbiology for engineering design.’ Chris is interested in Bayesian statistical approaches in microbial bioinformatics.
Mark Pallen
Co-Investigator
Mark started academic life as a medical microbiologist, with training in medicine (BA from Cambridge MBBS, MD from London) and laboratory research (PhD in Gordon Dougan’s lab at Imperial College, during which he captained the winning team in University Challenge.
Andy Millard
Co-Investigator
In June 2016 Andy was promoted to Assistant Professor at Warwick Medical School. He then moved to the University of Leicester in September 2017 to set up a lectureship.
Sam Sheppard
Co-Investigator
Sam is Professor and director of Bioinformatics (Milner Centre for Evolution) at the University of Bath and Co-I of CLIMB-BIG-DATA–the UKs largest cloud-based system for the analysis of microbial genomes.
Martin Antonio
Co-Investigator
Martin Antonio is Unit Molecular Biologist and Principal Investigator at the Medical Research Council Unit the Gambia at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Fajara, The Gambia. He serves as the Director, the WHO collaborating Centre for New Vaccines Surveillance and Heads the WHO Regional Reference Laboratory for Invasive Bacterial Diseases (IBD) for West and Central Africa. Martin also holds the position of Honorary Professor at Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, UK. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Pathologists (London, UK) and Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London, UK). His research is focused on the leverage of new molecular technologies in diagnosis of tropical infections, investigation of microbial transmission and clinical trials. Martin's group has led and participated in a growing number of large-scale international research projects, serving as the WHO reference laboratory for pneumococcal disease and establishing large disease surveillance platforms for bacterial infections across Africa.
Simon Ellwood-Thompson
Co-Investigator
Simon is Head of IT and Data Science at Swansea University. He is a systems architect with experience in the NHS and academia. He is responsible for delivering the technical workstream for Swansea as part of the UK network of health e-research centres of excellence.
The CLIMB-BIG-DATA project includes funding for two Research Softwares Engineers, who will provide vital skills for microbial genomics research including mathematical modelling, population genetics, computer science and bioinformatics.