After completing a PhD in mathematics at the University of Exeter, Gareth chose to apply his data-skills to the health sciences. He joined the ‘Genetics of Complex Traits’ team in August 2020, deep in COVID, under Prof. Tim Frayling as a Postdoctoral Associate. His performance resulted in him being promoted to Postdoctoral Fellow, and he has recently been awarded the BRC Translational Fellowship for Genetics and Genomics.
Gareth is interested in bridging Whole Genome Sequencing with association analyses. He primarily works in the UK Biobank, which has recently released 500,000 whole-genome sequences, linked to high-quality health data (a world first). In particular, he is currently investigating how he can best annotate and test rare (<1% frequency) variants in the 98% of the genome which does not code for proteins, in order to identify functional regulatory regions. As part of my BRC fellowship, Gareth will be studying the association between functional regulatory regions, relevant to a range of common human diseases, in the UK Biobank.