Eleanor Williams

I completed an integrated masters in Mathematics and Computer Science at the University of Oxford in June 2020 and joined the Core Bioinformatics group at the Cambridge Stem Cell Institute in August 2020 as a Research Assistant - Bioinformatician. My first major project at the CSCI, an extension of my master’s thesis, focused on applying Supervised Machine Learning and Genetic Algorithms to characterise miRNA-mRNA interactions using positional, nucleotide features. To further study the role of small RNAs and their integration into wider regulatory networks, I have also been working on a grid-based method to assess the covariation between mRNA and protein expression levels at spatial resolution in the mouse brain in early development, focusing on RNAscope and 10x Visium data. Over the past 2 years, I have worked closely with biologists studying a range of interesting questions by processing bulk and single-cell RNAseq, ChIPseq, small RNA and spatial transcriptomics datasets. More recently, I compiled a pipeline, bulkAnalyseR, to process bulk data and create a shiny app which could be used in-house and shared with the community to improve the accessibility and transparency of data analysis. In particular, for this pipeline I implemented a first version of multi-omics integration through GRNs, focusing on cis- or trans-regulatory interactions. Through my PhD project, I hope to further develop this idea and extract a wealth of information and insights from multi-omics data, particularly in the ASO context and through the integration of spatial data.