Speakers

Eilis Hannon is an Associate Professor in Bioinformatics in the Complex Disease Epigenetics Group at the University of Exeter Medical School and holds an EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellowship. She trained as a mathematician and has over thirteen years of experience developing statistical and computational approaches for analysing genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data. Much of her work focuses on understanding gene regulation in the context of brain and neurodevelopmental disorders, with an emphasis on integrating multiple layers of genomic information to investigate how genetic risk contributes to complex disease. 

Her research includes the development of integrated genomics approaches to explore the functional consequences of disease associated genetic variants, as well as contributions to large scale collaborative efforts. She leads the development team for the international Genetics of DNA Methylation Consortium and has contributed methods, standards, and software tools used in epigenetic epidemiology. Recent projects focus on computational alternatives to experimental cell isolation, including approaches for deriving cell type resolved epigenetic information directly from bulk tissue data. 

Eilis is also involved in work to support research software quality and reproducibility as a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute. At Exeter, she established the Coding for Reproducible Research training programme, which provides skills development in open and reproducible research practices for staff and students. This work has informed her interest in data science pedagogy and led to a Skills Policy Award from the Alan Turing Institute. 

She contributes to data science education and research culture through several leadership roles, including Assistant Director for Education in the Institute of Data