Isabel (PhD candidate) first joined our group as a Natural Sciences undergraduate at the University of Leeds, studying Biology and Maths. Her final year research project focussed on gaining new bioinformatics skills as they applied to phylogenomics. Her project focussed on the chordate clade comparing a variety of methods and datasets. She gained experience in using high performance computing, scripting in bash (UNIX environment) and how to design computational biology experiments. She carried out her Masters research project with Dr Julie Aspden’s group – applying these bioinformatic skills to understanding the evolution of long non-coding RNAs.

Isabel commenced her PhD in October 2018 in the area of lncRNA evolution and her project is supervised by both Dr. O’Connell and Dr Julie Aspden.