This lecture was given by Dr Whiffin to the Oxford University Personalised Medicine Society on 25 May 2022. Dr Whiffin joined the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics as a Group Leader and Sir Henry Dale Fellow, supported by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society, in Sept 2020. She is also a visiting scientist at both the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. She leads the Computational Rare Disease Genomics group, which uses computational approaches to interpret the role of genetic variants in rare diseases. Dr Whiffin’s undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at the University of Cambridge before she studied for a PhD in genetic susceptibility to Colorectal Cancer at the Institute of Cancer Research in London. During her postdoctoral work at Imperial College London, she developed tools and methods to improve interpretation of variants identified in patients with Inherited Heart Conditions.

A recording of a talk given to the Oxford Personalised Medicine Society in November 2021.

George is a statistical geneticist and science communicator. He has worked at the University of Oxford for more than 10 years and his scientific work has been published in Nature and Science, amongst other journals. He has always been fascinated by the potential of DNA to be used to reconstruct human evolutionary history by analysing large genomic datasets with advanced statistical modelling. He now leads Allelica’s scientific team, helping to bring polygenic risk scores to the market for the first time by showing their use in medical genetics.

The Oxford Personalised Medicine Society was thrilled to host Professor Sir Mark Caulfield, Chief Scientist for Genomics England and charged with delivery of the 100,000 Genomes Project. Professor Sir Caulfield is additionally director of the NIHR Biomedical Research Centre at Barts and the London school of Medicine and Dentistry. He was Director of William Harvey Research Institute (2002-2020), elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2008 and was President of the British Hypertension Society from 2009-2011.