Course organisers

Chiara Batini | Course Organiser

With a background in evolutionary biology, Chiara has dedicated the first ten years of her career to the study of human genetic diversity, with a special focus on sex-biased demographic processes in the history of Central African and European populations. In late 2016 she joined the Genetic Epidemiology group at University of Leicester to contribute to the development of precision medicine approaches in the context of multi-ethnicity. She holds a UKRI Innovation Fellowship at HDR UK for a project aimed at embracing multi-ethnicity in studying the genetics of smoking behaviour. This will help to underpin advances in precision prevention of tobacco-related disease, and contribute to define best practice for the analysis of health data in populations with a different demographic history, and genetic structure, from Europeans. Chiara has developed and delivered NGS and bioinformatics training courses in the context of several international programmes since 2013.

Piraveen Gopalasingam | Scientific Training Officer

Piv joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as a Scientific Training Officer for the Training Team and is primarily responsible for the scientific development and delivery of training within the CABANA project. He is a Train the Trainer instructor, and has an interest in science communication, community building, equality, diversity and inclusion.

Piv gained his BSc in Biomedical sciences at Queen Mary University of London in 2009 before completing his PhD at the University of Birmingham in 2015, investigating the structural biology of cancer-causing phosphatases. Whilst writing his thesis he joined the University of Warwick as a postdoctoral researcher studying receptor-ligand interactions and later took on a teaching position at Kingston University London. During this time, he obtained associate fellowship status from the Higher Education Academy, supervised structural bioinformatics MSc projects, co-organised the local Café Scientifique and co-founded the London chapter of PubhD, a communication platform for researchers to explain their work to the public.

Raheleh Rahbari | Course Organiser

Raheleh Rahbari is a group leader at the Sanger Institute investigating mutations arising in cancer and normal human cells during lifetime. With a background in Medical genetics and evolutionary genomics. My research focuses on understanding mutations acquired during ageing, with an aim to provide insight into the development, maintenance, mutational processes, and the role of selection in shaping cell populations. Over the past few years, systematic sequencing of tumours has revolutionised our understanding of cancer evolution. This has revealed that most cancers carry elevated number of mutations, accumulated through the lifetime of their cells. However, due to technical limitations, little is known about the pre-cancerous stage and how normal cells within our tissues accumulate mutations during ageing and in their progression towards cancer and/or other diseases. We investigate these early changes by studying somatic evolution in normal and precancerous tissues. Our current research focuses on understanding the role of germline predisposition on extent of somatic evolution in normal tissues, and the mechanisms that protect the germline cells from accumulating mutations during ageing.