Samuel Charles Robson

Biography

After completing a Bachelors degree in Mathematics at the University of Warwick in 2003, attaining a class 2.1 degree with Honours, I decided to continue my training at the University and joined the MOAC Doctoral Training Centre in its first year. I completed my MSc (which focused on inter-disciplinary science) in 2004, attaining a first class degree with distinction. I was awarded a PhD in Mathematical Biology and Biophysical Chemistry in January 2009.

My first position upon completing my PhD was as a post-doctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute where I work as a mathematical and statistical biologist working under Matt Hurles. My work focused on the analysis of CGH CNV genotyping data, in particular its application to case-control genome-wide association studies.

Following this, I moved into the group of Tony Kouzarides at the Wellcome Trust/CRUK Gurdon Institute where I worked as the lab bioinformatician. My main focus was on the analysis of the role of histone modifications, and in particular their role in diseases such as cancer. Much of my work involved the analysis of high-throughput sequencing data, in particular ChIP-seq of novel histone modifications.

I joined the University of Portsmouth as a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth in May 2017, and was promoted to Reader in Genomics and Bioinformatics in September 2021. I am also the Bioinformatics lead at the Centre for Enzyme Innovation (CEI). Our goal is to identify and develop enzymatic solutions to help solve global environmental issues such as the current plastics crisis.

Outside of work, I am a keen runner and regularly take part in ultra-marathons, often running over 100 miles at a time. I am also an avid martial artist and hold a black belt (1st Degree) in the Korean art of Tae Kwon Do.

Languages: R, Perl, C++, MySQL, Python, PHP, AWK, Bash

Computational: Maintenance and processing of large data sets (particularly NGS data), high-throughout data analysis (e.g. PCA, statistical modeling, clustering), normalisation of complex data sets

Laboratory: High throughput sequencing (Illumina and Nanopore), laser capture microdissection, small-sample RNA preparations, microarrays, immunohistochemical staining, PCR and quantitative RT PCR