Dr Eilis Hannon

Eilis Hannon is an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics in the Complex Disease Epigenetics Group and currently holds a 5 year EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellowship. She possesses a strong statistical background having studied for a BSc in Mathematics at Cardiff University. In order to transition to the field of genomics of brain disorders, she completed her PhD in Bioinformatics at Cardiff University Centre for Psychological Medicine and Clinical Neurosciences. During her PhD she developed a novel statistical approach to characterise the trajectories of genes associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in the brain across the life course.  She joined the Epigenetics Group in 2014 to work on epigenome-wide association studies of complex traits. Her current research focuses on applying and developing the latest methods to integrate genetic, transcriptomic and epigenomic datasets in order to identify the functional consequences of genetic risk factors for complex brain disorders. In addition to my EPSRC Fellowship, I have held a NARSAD young investigator award, Alan Turing Pilot Project award, and Alzheimer's Society PhD studentship in addition to being a co-applicant on many successful grants from MRC, NIA and ARUK.  

As strong advocates of open access research, the group routinely share these data through online tools enabling other researchers to explore and visualise specific genes or genomic locations relevant for their work.  In 2016, Eilis was awarded a fellowship from the Software Sustainability Institute, to act as an ambassador for their ethos of improving the quality and reproducibility of research software. Evolving from her Software Sustainability Institute fellowship and Carpentries Instructor certification, Eilis established and co-ordinates the Coding for Reproducible Research training programme at Exeter. This has led to an interest in the pedagogy of data science and successful application to the Alan Turing Institute Skills Policy Award. Her expertise in statistics, experience in data science education and continued commitment to developing these skills in students and colleagues has led to a number of leadership roles, including Assistant Director for Education in the Institute of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Institutional Reproducibility Co-Lead, Data Science Lead in the MRC funded GW4 Biomed DTP, and co-lead for the MSc module Statistics for Health and Life Sciences.