Trainer biographies

Aleena Mushtaq | EMBL-EBI

Aleena studied Molecular and Biomedical Sciences at King’s College London. She joined the Quadram Institute Biosciences, UK to pursue her PhD in the field of Molecular Biology. Her PhD investigated the molecular and microbial changes in the gut-liver axis in response to the high-fibre and low-fibre Western diets. Aleena joined EMBL-EBI as an Ensembl Outreach Officer in 2021 and delivers training on Ensembl resources.

Aleix Puig | EMBL-EBI

I am employed as a biomedical ontology editor in EMBL-EBI since January 2023. Prior to joining the EBI, I was a wet lab scientist working with the powerful animal model Drosophila melanogaster, interested in the molecular mechanisms that control the maintenance of the tissue homeostasis. This work could not be possible if it weren’t for the existence and maintenance of great services, such as flybase, ontologies or uniprot. For this reason, once I finished my postdoc, I wanted to contribute making these tools grow, and now I can do it by extending the cell ontology (CL) and the anatomy ontology (uberon) and being part of the HuBMAP consortium.

Antonia Lock | EMBL-EBI

Following a PhD in molecular biology, I started my career as a curator at the PomBase database in 2011. From 2016, I split my time with the drug discovery company Healx focusing on treatments for rare diseases. From 2020, I started working full time as a biocurator at the UniProt database. I have enjoyed being part of a varied range of projects over my career from curating model and pathogenic organisms to human, drugs, and diseases, developing new procedures, encouraging community data submissions, and problem-solving data display and software specification. I have developed standards to describe metadata for genome-wide HTP data sets, mapped controlled vocabularies to ontologies, and provided training sets for machine learning applications. I have in all my roles been involved in promoting the efficient use of curated data by training users, students, and novice curators.

Claire O’Donovan | EMBL-EBI

Claire O’Donovan leads the Metabolomics team at EMBL-EBI and is particularly interested in how the scientific community can exploit the interoperability of the fields of genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics which are constantly evolving. Prior to stepping into this role in early 2017, Claire led the Protein Function Content team at EMBL-EBI for many years, providing essential resources to the biological community through the biocuration of UniProt, the Gene Ontology Annotation project (GOA) and the Enzyme Portal. Claire joined EMBL in 1993, and has been integral to the evolution of the biocuration field.

Elena Speretta | EMBL-EBI

Elena Speretta is a senior biocurator in the Protein Function Content team at EMBL-EBI providing manual annotations to UniProtKB database and working on the development and quality assessment of automatic annotation systems. Before joining EMBL-EBI, she worked on several research projects on neurodegenerative diseases.

Elliot Sollis | EMBL-EBI

I completed my PhD in the genetics of language-related disorders at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. I relied heavily on publicly-available databases to support my research, which convinced me of the value of good biological data curation for open and collaborative science.
I now work as a Scientific Curator for the GWAS Catalog – a database of human genome-wide association studies. My roles include interpreting and annotating GWAS publications, supporting authors to submit their data, and maintaining and enhancing the scientific content, design and user experience of our website and online tools.

George Georghiou | Novartis

George has spent the last 7 years of his career focusing on data curation and trying to come up with best ways for solving many of the practical issues that many curators come across. Having done his PhD in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at Stony Brook University, and a post-doctoral stint at the University of Dundee, he found the bench wasn’t where he wanted to be. Originally diving into this vast and incredible field of work at EMBL-EBI as a part of the Gene Ontology Annotation Project and UniProtKB, he found a new passion for data curation, engineering, governance, and FAIRification. He took the skills he learned from his time at the EBI and went on to work in Novartis, specifically in the Novartis Knowledge Center where he spends the majority of his time setting up high-throughput annotation pipelines for biomedical literature, clinical trial data, patents, and grants in a FAIRified data model so it can be leveraged by the entirety of Novartis.

Matt Jeffryes | EMBL-EBI

I am a researcher and developer interested in biomedical text mining and particularly in the facilitation of biocuration. I have a Masters in Informatics from the University of Edinburgh, a PhD in biological science from Cambridge University. I am currently working in the EBI’s Literature Services and Molecular Networks teams to enhance Europe PMC’s service offering to biocurators.

Michele Magrane | EMBL-EBI

Michele Magrane is the UniProt Annotation Coordinator at EMBL-EBI, managing a team of biocurators who contribute to the expert curation of the UniProt Knowledgebase. She studied at University College Dublin and has more than 20 years’ experience in the field of protein curation. She was a founding member of the International Society for Biocuration and has served on the Nominating and Award Committees of the society.

Nancy Ontiveros | EMBL-EBI

I am Nancy Ontiveros. I am a biologist with a Master of Science in Biochemistry and with a background in bioinformatics, molecular biology, and biochemistry. For my undergraduate work, I identified potential novel regulatory RNAs [PMID: 18179415]. Then during my master’s, I tested the effect of mutations on the function of THI box regulatory non-coding RNA (ncRNA) [PMID: 15363900], and my current Ph.D. work focuses on mapping the genetic context of TPP riboswitch regulatory ncRNA. Since 2020 I have been the curator for Rfam (https://rfam.org), the home of ncRNAs families [PMID: 33211869]. In Rfam, I create new and update ncRNA families. This involves using RNA secondary structure predictions and 3D structures to improve RNA 2D families, determining the threshold for including homologous sequences and annotating families with description and references, as well as writing Wikipedia articles for the families.

Pedro Raposo | EMBL-EBI

Pedro Raposo is a Bioinformatician in the Protein Function Content team of UniProt at EMBL-EBI working on creation of rules for automatic annotation of protein function. After obtaining his MSc in Bioinformatics, he worked at the UK Stem Cell Bank on genomic data, before joining EMBL-EBI.

Sarah Dyer | EMBL-EBI

I am the Non-vertebrate Genomics Team Leader at EMBL-EBI where I lead the Plants, Metazoa and Outreach teams within the Ensembl project, and also the EMBL-EBI WormBase team. I joined EMBL-EBI in 2021; Prior to that I led a research group at NIAB, UK, focused on genetic diversity in cassava and common bean. Before that I lead the Crop Genomics and Diversity group at the Earlham Institute, UK after spending time as a bioinformatician supporting the breeding programs at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia. My interests are in developing informatics tools and resources to support the use of genetic diversity to address challenges for agriculture worldwide.