Profile

I live near Exeter in Devon with my husband and two cats. I work in a hospital molecular genetics department and I love my job as every day is different and I search through DNA with the help of computers for what might be only a single letter change in 3 billion letters that might be causing a patients’ disease or disorder.

I went to University and studied Biomedical Science, then Forensic Science and worked as a forensic scientist for several years before retraining in Clinical Bioinformatics. I really enjoyed working in forensics but my current job is much more varied and I learn new things about genetics and programming every day, I also know that the work I do helps people affected by a genetic diseases.

I didn’t even know what a Clinical Bioinformatician was until 4 years ago and now after a 3-year NHS-funded training course, I have the most interesting job that helps people AND I get to do programming everyday!

My role mainly involves sitting at a computer all day, running computer programs and searching through lots of information to try and find the cause of a patients’ disease or disorder. However, each day is different as there are lots of patients with different diseases, sometimes the computer programs need extra development or other days I’m helping teach other people what I do.

We sometimes have urgent samples come in where we know the possible result from the test might affect the treatment a patient receives, and we work as quickly as we can to get the results out for the doctor.

We work really closely with those in the laboratory that extract the DNA from the patients’ sample and generate the DNA sequence and the genetic counsellors and doctors that discuss the results with the patients.