Julia is Project Manager for DECIPHER, an international web-based platform that shares anonymised genetic and phenotypic data from rare disease patients and provides variant interpretation interfaces. DECIPHER helps clinical and research teams to assess the pathogenicity of variants and to share patient data, which is key to discovery and diagnosis. The platform is under continual development and enables the transition of new datasets and tools developed by the research community into clinic. Julia has been DECIPHER Project Manager for six years, using her molecular biology and genetics expertise to grow and develop the platform.
Julia’s undergraduate degree was in Molecular Biology and Genetics, before she studied for a PhD in the genetic and molecular analysis of root hair growth in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana at the John Innes Centre, Norwich. After several years in academic research at the University of Edinburgh she began coordinating a multi-disciplinary multi centred systems biology project investigating the impact of temperature on the signalling properties of a defined network. Julia transitioned to Human Genetics in 2015, joining the Wellcome Sanger Institute to coordinate projects involved with exploring patterns of mutations that arise in human cells to understand how DNA damage and repair processes contribute towards aging and cancer, before taking up her current role on DECIPHER in 2016.