Research Group
Alan Hodgkinson
Group Leader
Alan did his PhD at the University of Sussex, with Professor Adam Eyre-Walker studying variation in the mutation rate in mammalian genomes. Following this he did a postdoc with Dr Philip Awadalla at Sainte Justine Hospital, University of Montreal, Canada. Whilst in Montreal, Alan worked on the population genetics of French-Canadians, as well as a large gene expression study within the CARTaGENE project.
Anna Saukkonen
PhD Student
I am on a LIDo PhD programme doing a project with Alan’s group and Dr. Helena Kilpinen’s group (UCL). I am looking at allele-specific expression during cellular differentiation utilising HipSci resource. Differential levels of gene expression associated with distinct genotypes are most often studied on a population level and with common genetic variants. This approach, although informative, often misses the important rare variants. In my project I am tackling these issues by looking at allele-specific expression within single individuals, using the full information of their genomes.
Max Tomlinson
PhD Student
Max is a university graduate with a Master’s degree from UCL and an interest in age-related diseases. His degree included a year abroad at the University of Copenhagen and an extended project, where he attempted to resolve contentious evolutionary relationships between species using a novel phylogenetic inference method. He also spent time gaining research experience at the University of Helsinki before moving back to the UK in 2019 and enrolling in a 4-year doctoral training programme at KCL, where he is now applying machine learning methods to multi-dimensional and longitudinal datasets to try and predict future incidences of heart disease.
Aine Fairbrother-Browne
PhD Student
Aine is on a Lido PhD programme under the supervision of Mina Ryten and Alan Hodgkinson. She's interested in mitochondrial transcriptional processes in the brain, the cross talk between the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes, and whether these relationships become perturbed under neurological diseases status.
Regina Punzalan
PhD Student
Regina is on a RENOIR-ITN PhD programme under the supervision of Georgina Ellison-Hughes and Alan Hodgkinson. She's working on the cellular and molecular signatures of cardioPICs with myogenic potential to understand their roles in cardiac homeostasis or repair. She will investigate the single-cell transcriptome of cardioPICs isolated from aged mice and human hearts and explore the somatic mutations in the nuclear and mitochondrial genomes across single cells of both young and old tissue.
Lab Alumni
Aminah Ali
PhD Student
I joined Alan’s group in 2016. Prior to this, I completed my MSci Human Genetics degree at UCL, where I worked on an association mapping project using targeted NGS data in relation to type 2 diabetes and a project examining lactase persistence in worldwide populations. Broadly, my research interests lie in understanding genetic variation in human populations and I am currently analysing large-scale, multi-tissue genomic datasets in order to gain insight into genomic drivers of mitochondrial post-transcriptional modification events.
Guillermo Carbajosa
Research Associate
I will be working as Research Associate within Alan Hodgkinson’s lab. My project involves the analysis of large genomic datasets, alongside deep phenotyping information, to study the genetics and mechanisms of the human mitochondrial transcriptome with the ultimate aim of understanding where these processes break down in human disease. My background is in Biology and Bioinformatics and I have worked with several types of ‘omics data, including gene expression (microarrays and RNA-Seq) and DNA-methylation data sourced from human and different animal models.
© 2021 by Alan Hodgkinson