laura.fachal@sanger.ac.uk @FachalLaura
Position
Senior Staff Scientist
Affiliation
Wellcome Sanger Institute and Lucy Cavendish College
Keywords
Genetic Epidemiology, Genetics, Bioinformatics
I am particularly interested in understanding how common variation in the DNA contributes to the development of common diseases.
I am a Senior Staff Scientist in Carl Anderson’s team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. I completed a MSc in Biotechnology (Studying mitochondrial genome as a factor of genetic predisposition to meningococcal disease) and a PhD (Studying genetic susceptibility markers to prostate cancer and genetic variants involved in radiation-induced toxicity) at the University of Santiago de Compostela.
I came to the UK as a postdoc with a Marie Skłodowska-Curie IF Fellowship, Grant agreement ID: 656144, to work with Dr Alison Dunning’s team at the Centre for Cancer Genetic Epidemiology, within the University of Cambridge. My focus there was to determine and increase our understanding, through fine mapping approaches, of how common variation in the DNA increases the risk of developing breast cancer and radiation induced toxicity. During this postdoc I collaborated with several international consortiums including the Breast Cancer Association Consortium or the Radiogenomics Consortium.
My current role at the Wellcome Sanger Institute focuses on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Currently I am leading a large international collaborative effort, as part of the International IBD Consortium, to identify additional regions in the DNA linked to increased risk of developing IBD.