Speakers

 Dr Helen Parkinson is Head of the Knowledge Management Section at EMBL-EBI and an EMBL Senior Scientist. With her faculty colleagues, Melissa Harrison, Henning Hermjakob and Ugis Sarkans she provides essential resources for accessing knowledge from publications and experimental data. 

Helen also leads EMBL-EBI’s Samples, Phenotypes and Ontologies team, delivering genomic resources and semantic tools. Trained as a geneticist, Helen's research prior to joining EMBL focused on Drosophila circadian behaviour and medical genetics for rare disease gene discovery. She shifted focus to bioinformatics and computational biology while performing positional cloning to identify the causal gene for primary pulmonary hypertension. Helen's passion is semantic data integration and providing users with high quality data at scale. Her team participates extensively in external collaborations ranging from data analysis and generation projects to infrastructure projects. 

 
Helen is a co-chair of the EMBL Human Ecosystem Transversal Theme. This address key questions that will bring a quantitative, mechanistic, and molecular understanding of environmental effects on human biology. This work integrates EMBL research and services to arrive at a molecular understanding of how we interact with our physical, biological, and social environments. 

 
Helen's current community activities include: Chairperson of BBSRC Committee C, Membership of the MRC Data Science Advisory Group,  Technology Advisory Board Member for Our Future Health and Associate Directorship of Health Data Research Cambridge.