During the financial year 2021-22, the Trust completed its support of one PhD student at the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics at King’s College London, which ended with a short extension to mitigate the effects of the COVID pandemic on research activity and allowed the completion of her thesis.
In July 2015 Dr Alan Hodgkinson joined the Department of Medical and Molecular Genetics as an MRC funded Career Development Fellow (CDF). Alan was one of four computational biology fellows funded as part of an MRC multi-institute high performance computer infrastructure award (eMedLab ) to KCL, UCL, QMUL, Crick Institute, Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and European Bioinformatics Institute. Key to attracting him to the Department was obtaining support from the Generation Trust for a PhD studentship allocated to him.
Aminah Ali started her PhD in October 2016 and developed into an excellent computational biologist, becoming an expert in the genetic underpinnings of functionally important post-transcriptional processes taking place in human mitochondria. Aminah become a skilled genome analyst, an expertise that is increasingly important in data driven health sciences. She is in an excellent position to apply her training to make important discoveries in disease biology. In October 2018 and October 2019 she presented her work at a large international genetics conference (ASHG) and in February 2019 her work was published in a high impact journal [1] which was highlighted by the journal and attracted interest from many other researchers. Subsequent work was published in March 2020 [2], again attracting interest from the global research community and leading to several new collaborations for the group. During 2021/22 the group has published two more papers [3,4] that Aminah’s work has contributed to. Aminah passed her thesis viva in 2021 and as of 2022 the corrected thesis is available for download in the King’s thesis archive [5].
The Department is very appreciative of all of this funding from the Generation Trust.
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