Research Seminar: Early Career Researcher Cancer Showcase

The Genomics England Research Seminar series is a season of events held to demonstrate the best research from Genomics England and our partners. They started in October 2018, and are monthly, free-to-attend evenings of talks presented by GECIP members on the latest research being performed on the 100,000 Genomes Project data from our academic community (GECIP), commercial partners (Discovery Forum), COVID analysis and Genomics England research on other cohorts.

This July's seminar will be a special event, highlighting the work of some of the brilliant Early Career Researchers working with data in the Genomics England Research Environment. This month's speakers will be:

Mutational processes and genomic aberrations driving cancer evolution in 1011 lung tumours - Kerstin Thol

Kerstin is a 3rd year PhD student in Dr Nicholas McGranahan’s lab at the University College London Cancer Institute and has a background in cancer bioinformatics. Her research focusses on exploring and integrating mutational processes and large structural aberrations in lung cancer evolution using whole genome sequencing.

Towards the translation of radiogenomics into the clinic: Building a pipeline that combines classic and deep learning methods using genomic information and multi-parametric MRI - Golestan Karami

Golestan is an accomplished applied machine learning researcher and a research associate with expertise in deep learning, multi-parametric MRI and radiogenomics. Her research focuses on building a pipeline that combines classic and deep learning methods using medical imaging and genomics information for translation into clinical settings.

Can mutations in the non-protein-coding “Dark Matter” of our genome drive tumorigenesis? Insights from 16,000 Genomics England tumours - Sunandini Ramnarayanan

Sunandini is a PhD researcher at University College Dublin, Ireland and has a BS-MS in Biology from IISER Mohali, India. She is co-funded by SFI-CRT Genomics Data Science and MSCA-Integrate to study the role of long non-coding RNAs in cancer by using somatic mutation data from tumour whole genomes.

Analysis of Copy Number and Structural Variation associated to cancer predisposition in the pan-cancer cohort of Genomics England - Robert Scott

Rob is a PhD student in bioinformatics with a specialisation in computational cancer genomics. His current work and interest are mainly focussed on the analysis of cancer-related germline structural variants within the 100,000 Genomes Project.

Genomic correlates of melanoma outcomes following first-line immune checkpoint inhibition - Ben Shum

Ben is a medical oncologist with an interest in immuno-oncology and melanoma. He completed his undergraduate medical degree at the University of Melbourne in 2011 and was awarded his specialist qualifications in medical oncology by the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in 2020. Since then, he has worked as Clinical Research Fellow in the Renal and Skin Unit, Royal Marsden Hospital, London. Ben is currently undertaking a MD(Res) under the supervision of Professor Samra Turajlic, studying mechanisms of response and resistance to immuno-oncology therapies in melanoma.

About the research seminars

The seminars will be held on the last Tuesday of each month at 2 to 3pm. These will be online sessions open to everyone and free to attend, we hope to have representation from across the GECIP, Discovery Forum and 100,000 Genomes Project participants as well as anyone else who would be interested in joining.

For updates on the seminars including announcements and speakers please follow the GECIP team Twitter. You can watch all previous Research Seminars on the Genomics England YouTube channel.

If you would like to present your research from the Genomics England Research Environment at one of these events please get in touch with the GECIP team at [email protected] and if you intend to publish on this research please include this so that we can publicise your paper on our Publications page.