Eilis Hannon

Eilis is a Senior Research Fellow in the Complex Disease Epigenetics Group and currently holds a Research Software Engineering Fellowship from the EPSRC. Her research focuses on integrating multiple layers of genomic data from a range of technologies to model the dynamic nature of gene expression and epigenetic variation and explore how this mediates genetic risk for complex diseases. Eilis graduated with a degree in Mathematics in 2010 and went on to complete a PhD in the department of Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University. She used statistical techniques to characterise the developmental trajectory of gene expression for genes associated with schizophrenia. As a student of both the Medical School and the School of Computer Science, she developed a knowledge of genetics, particularly that of psychiatric disorders, and bioinformatics skills. The results of her PhD indicated an enrichment of schizophrenia risk genes in epigenetic pathways, and she was keen to pursue this area of research. To this end, she joined Exeter at the end of 2013 as a Bioinformatician and now leads a group of analysts within the Complex Disease Epigenetic Group. She has been awarded funding from the Brain and Behaviour Foundation, Software sustaiability Institute, Alzhiemer’s Society and Alan Turing Institute.

As well as a diverse range of research activities, Eilis also advocates for reproducible research methodspartly through her membership of the Institutional Leadership Team for Reproduciblity. At the University of Exeter, she leads the Coding for Reproducible Research Training Programme which delivers training to staff and students in coding and associated skills. She is a certified Software and Data Carpentry Instructor and Carpentries Trainer and through an Alan Turing Skills Policy Award is investigating best practices in data science education across disciplines. She leads a statistics module for the Health Data Science MSc programme, and acts as Biomedical Health Theme lead for the Institute of Data Science and Artifical Intelligence and GW4 BioMed2 Data Science Training Lead.