
Thomas Otto is a Senior lecturer for Bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow. He has a vast experience in NGS genomics, from the basics of sequencing technologies, quality control of data, genome and transcriptomic projects and genotype to phenotype projects.
Through his career, he taught many workshops on NGS genomics, including de novo assembly, Introduction to bioinformatics (Wellcome Trust advanced courses (WTAC)), more applied workshops like working with pathogen genomes or working with parasite databases. He also teaches at the University of Glasgow data analysis, R and transcriptomics for undergraduate and masters students.
Kathryn Crouch is a team leader for the bioinformatics team at the Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology, University of Glasgow. Her background is in comparative immunology and she worked in the pharmaceutical industry for several years before taking up her current position.
In her current role, she manages a team providing advice and computational analysis to Wellcome Centre members working with NGS and other high throughput data in eukaryotic pathogens. She also develops software for the VEuPathDB suite of databases (https://veupathdb.org/). Teaching experience includes running an applied bioinformatics module on the MSc Bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow for the last three years, and contributing to applied courses including the Wellcome Trust Advanced Courses Working with Parasite Database Resources workshop for the last six years.
Kathryn and Thomas have run the annual first week of the Bioinformatics summer school together since 2018. Sadly no Kathryn this year..
Olympia Hardy graduated from the University of Southampton with a degree in Biomedical Science before undertaking an MSc in Bioinformatics at the University of Glasgow in 2019. She then worked as a bioinformatician focusing on the immune response in COVID-19.
Her PhD project aims to utilise bioinformatics to analyse single-cell RNA sequencing data to elucidate the evolution of cell-cell interactions that may play a key role in early disease onset to late-stage rheumatoid (RA) and psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and other inflammatory diseases.
She is currently developing an interactive visualisation method called cellXplore that will allow users to investigate cell-cell interactions without the need for prior bioinformatics experience. With this she has applied her knowledge of cell-cell interactions and single-cell to elucidate inflammatory diseases such as COVID-19, parasite infection and atlas-level data consisting of various chronic and acute diseases.
Her prior teaching experience consists of demonstrating on various bioinformatic modules run at the University of Glasgow since 2020 in addition to the Bioinformatics Summer School in previous years.
Ross Laidlaw graduated from the University of Glasgow in 2020 with an honours degree in Immunology. During his honours project, he discovered his love (and hate) relationship with single-cell RNA-seq analysis, where he benchmarked various trajectory inference packages and investigated the transcriptomic changes that occur in immune cells during malaria infection and hypertension.
Following his undergraduate studies, Ross began a PhD in the MRC Precision Medicine DTP program, where his project is focused on using transcriptomic analysis techniques to investigate parasite lifecycle transitions. During this project, he has made TrAGEDy, a tool for aligning scRNA-seq trajectories between conditions, analysed a model of insect stage development of the parasite Trypanosoma brucei and helped craft the first scRNA-seq atlas of Trypanosome cruzi in vitro development.
Ross and Olympia have been teaching assistants at the University of Glasgow Bioinformatics summer school for four years now, and starting last year, they created and led the Advanced Single Cell course of the summer school.