People

Erola Pairo-Castineira

PSH Fellow

Erola worked with us for 4 years moved on in September 2024 to take up a senior position in drug development at Regeneron.

She obtained her PhD on Bioinformatics from the University of Barcelona. She then moved to Edinburgh to work on genetics and functional genomics in order to explore the mechanisms that bring from genotype to phenotype. Erola brought her expertise on integrating genetics data with other genomics datasets such as gene or protein expression to find potential causal genes or variants, which can then lead to drug target prioritisation.

Ana Villaplana Velasco

MRC Transition Fellow

Ana worked with us as an MRC Transition Fellow at PHS, focused on discovering potential sex-specific therapeutic targets and developing sex-specific predictive models for cardiovascular disease. She moved on to work in drug development in industry, with Genomics PLC.

Ana completed a PhD in Precision Medicine, where she investigated the genetic component of retinal vascular variations and the extent of its association with cardiovascular disease. This project resulted in the elucidation of genomic regions contributing to retinal variations as well as regulatory elements that are key after a major cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack. This work also included the development of a predictive model for incident cardiovascular diseases using a machine learning strategy on retinal, genetic and risk factor information, which was able to better identify those at high risk of developing a heart attack or stroke. This experience kindled her interest in precision medicine and led her to pursue the MRC Transition Fellowship award in the discovery of sex-specific targets for cardiovascular disease at PSH. She now analyses the genetic elements contributing to cardiovascular diseases in males and females separately and whether these genetic determinants can be used as potential drug targets. Ana also will investigate whether the development of sex-specific risk tools for incident cardiovascular conditions improves when compared to available risk models.

Bo Wang

PhD Student

Bo completed a PhD, jointly supervised by Michael Gutmann, Ross Fitzgerald and David Dockrell, in 2022. Before joining us, Bo got his distinction MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence from The University of Edinburgh in 2018 after completed undergraduate training in software engineering with a first class honours degree in 2017 from University College Dublin. He completed a systematic evaluation of the MAIC algorithm, showing that it performs better than other aggregation methods in most circumstances (Nature 2020, Bioinformatics 2022).

Valentina Riggio

Postdoctoral Quantitative Geneticist

Valentina worked with us on GWAS and eQTL analyses, and moved on to a permanent position as a quantitative geneticist in the Roslin Institute.

Valentina is a quantitative geneticist, with an animal breeding background. Valentina completed her PhD in Animal Breeding and Genetics in a collaboration between the University of Palermo (Italy) and Wageningen University (The Netherlands), exploring the genetic aspects of somatic cell count as indirect indicator of mastitis and its correlation with both production traits and infection status in dairy sheep. In 2010 she moved to the Roslin Institute and through the years she studied the genetic basis underlying several diseases and other complex traits in livestock.

Valentina has been for several years an active member of several culture building committees (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Mental Health Peer Supporter) at both Easter Bush and College level, supporting, developing and advocating for initiatives aiming to enhance good practice and ensure a safe working environment for staff and students.

Andy Bretherick

PhD Student

Andy completed his PhD in 2019, co-supervised by Chris Haley and Chris Ponting. He used protein quantitative trait loci (pQTL) and Mendelian randomisation to identify proteins on causal pathways to disease.( PLoS Genetics 2020, Nature 2020, Nature 2022, Nature 2023 ) He also recoded our physiological model of oxygen delvery.

He left to lead his own research group at the Institute for Genetics and Cancer, University of Edinburgh, and to work as a consultant in pain medicine.

Lucile Neyton

PhD Student

Lucile completed an MSc in bioinformatics in 2016 and did a PhD with us on the MRC Doctoral Training Scheme in Precision Medicine, jointly supervised by Damian Mole. Her work demonstrated that the “hyper-/hypo-inflammatory” phenotypes in ARDS are also found in patients who do not have ARDS, and who are not critically ill, by finding the same stratification signals in pancreatitis. After a short period as a postdoc in the lab, we helped her to find a position in an outstanding research group at UCSF.

Andru Tomoiu

Postdoctoral research fellow

Andru was the first postdoc in the lab, working on influenza infection and functional genomics in macrophages for 10 months in 2013 (Nature, 2014, J Virol, 2020)

During his time in the lab Andru decided that, after 10 years of work in laboratory science and virology, he wanted to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor. He was accepted into medical school, and qualified in medicine in 2017. He is now working as a primary care doctor in his native Quebec.

Tim Regan

Postdoctoral research fellow

With a strong foundation in innate immune-mediated inflammation regulation from his PhD, Tim joined the Roslin Institute in 2014, where he cultivated expertise in bioinformatics and network graphing. His research journey led him through macrophage transcriptomics and honey bee metagenomics, eventually culminating in Genome-scale CRISPR Knock-Out (GeCKO) screening to explore host susceptibility/resistance genes involved in human, chickens and pigs.

Tim shifted his focus to work on the potential of bivalves as food sources for humans. In 2023, he was awarded a Career Track Fellowship at Roslin, and now leads an independent research group dedicated to unravelling the complexities of immune regulation in aquaculture invertebrates.