ELIXIR is pleased to announce three new appointments to strengthen the coordination capacity within the ELIXIR Hub. The three new members will work as Technical Coordinators for two ELIXIR Platforms (Tools and Interoperability) and the ELIXIR Human Data Use Case.
Jen Harrow
Jen has taken up the post of ELIXIR Tools Platform Coordinator. Working closely with the Tools Platform leadership team, Jen will play a key role in the aligning the development of ELIXIR Tools and Services Registry with other ELIXIR services. Jen will also drive ELIXIR benchmarking strategy and facilitate collaboration with other ELIXIR Platforms and Use Cases.
Jen joins us from Illumina, where she was Program Manager for Population Genomics, primarily involved in collaborating with Genomics England to develop an Interpretation Platform for Cancer and Rare Disease. Prior to this, she was leading the GENCODE project at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, producing the curated human and mouse reference gene sets. She also collaborated with the Gerstein Group in Yale on Pseudogene analysis and worked with the Centre for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona on identification of lncRNAs. Jen Harrow holds an Mphil from the Sussex University and a PhD in Plant Sciences from Cambridge University.
Sirarat Sarntivijai
Sirarat Sarntivijai works as the ELIXIR Interoperability Platform Technical Coordinator, supporting the Platform scientific leadership. She drives the development and implementation of the Platform portfolio of interoperability services and manages collaboration between five ELIXIR technical Platforms and the associated Use Cases.
Sirarat is a domain expert in ontologies and linked-data in biomedical sciences and translational healthcare. In her previous post at EMBl-EBI she was working on the Experimental Factor Ontology, and was involved in the development of ontology-assisted data integration framework in many projects including the Human Cell Atlas, OpenTargets, and PredicTOX. Sirarat received her PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Michigan, US, and completed her postdoctoral training at the US FDA Office of Clinical Pharmacology.
Gary Saunders
Gary Saunders joins ELIXIR in the role of Human Data Coordinator. He will lead the implementation of the ELIXIR-wide strategy to enable responsible sharing of human data consented for reuse in scientific research. A major focus of this role will be working with the existing Human Data Communities to ensure that all data generated is compliant with the FAIR data principles, and to coordinate these efforts with the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH).
Gary joins us from EMBL-EBI where he was the data manager for the European Variation Archive (EVA), and the Database of Genomics Variants Archive (DGVa). He has a PhD in Bioinformatics from the University of Glasgow, UK, and has a background in comparative genomics.