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The DAG is made up of full-time members and Associates.

Full-Time members work on a variety of projects in collaboration with different research groups.  

Associates are normally focused on a particular research project, but they attend weekly DAG meetings and so their expertise is applied to all projects.

Nick Schurch: Nick is an Associate Member of the  Data Analysis Group (DAG) a sub-group of the Barton Group.  He was supported by funding from the Scottish Universities Life Science Alliance (SULSA)  as part of our venture to carry out innovative data analysis for high data content/high-throughput techniques such as proteomics mass-spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing.

Nick, like Marek, has also made the transition from astronomy to biology.  Nick studied for an MSci in physics at the University of Bristol, before completing his astrophysics Ph.D. at the University of Leicester.  Nick has had postdoc positions on three continents (Europe, USA and Asia) culminating with a UK-China Fellowshiop for Excellence with the Institute for High Energy Physics in Beijing, China, before joining the Data Analysis Group.  Nick has always had a strong interest in biology (despite studying physics) and is particularly looking forward to working in a field with more immediate relevance to the world!  Nick enjoys playing bridge and football and is a lifelong Liverpool fan and is also looking forward to improving on the (very) little Mandarin he picked up in China.

Nick joined the DAG on 1st May 2009 and on 1st July 2012 moved onto a joint BBSRC grant between Geoff Barton and Gordon Simpson to work on non-coding RNA in Arabidopsis.

Marek Gierlinski : Marek is a Full-Time member of the Data Analysis Group (DAG) a sub-group of the Barton Group.  He is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression as part of our joint venture to carry out innovative data analysis for high data content/high-throughput techniques such as proteomics mass-spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing.

Marek was born and educated in Poland. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and completed his PhD in astrophysics at N. Copernicus Centre in Warsaw. He moved to Durham in 2000 as a postdoc and stayed there until 2009 in a succession of research and teaching positions. His main interest there was weird astrophysical objects: black holes and neutron stars. 2009 marked a dramatic change in his career: switching to Bioinformatics. One huge step for a man…

Marek joined the DAG on 23rd March 2009

Pieta Schofield: Pieta is a Full-Time member of the Data Analysis Group (DAG) a sub-group of the Barton Group.  Pieta is supported by funding from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Gene Regulation and Expression as part of our joint venture to carry out innovative data analysis for high data content/high-throughput techniques such as proteomics mass-spectrometry and next generation DNA sequencing.

After working as a programmer and systems analyst for various finance sector companies, Pieta spent five years working as systems manager for the Parke-Davis Neuroscience Research Centre in Cambridge. She then returned to academia completing a PhD in mathematical biology at the University of Dundee in 2002. Since then she completed a Wellcome Trust Training Fellowship in Mathematical Biology, switching theoretical insects for the real thing.  Pieta joined the Data Analysis Group in January 2009 from the SCRI where she developed methods for thermographic detection of plant stress.

Pieta joined the DAG on 1st January 2009

Chris Cole:  Senior Bioinformatics Research Officer and founder member of the Data Analysis Group.  Chris is now an Associate Member of the DAG.

As another ex-Simon Hubbard (Manchester) group member (like Ian Overton) Chris found the attraction of Dundee too great to miss.  He dragged his family along with him, although, his wife was happy to be back in Scotland!

Chris left the bench after a traumatising Ph.D. and has been 'doing' Bioinformatics ever since. In that time he has worked on protein-protein interface prediction, homology modelling, Prion protein structure analysis and various aspects of proteomics. Now in Dundee Chris works on a variety of projects, but mainly in the realm of protein structure. Under his remit in the Scottish Bioinformatics Research Network, Chris is always happy to discuss interesting problems which may have a Bioinformatics angle.
 

Chris joined the group on 1st Feb 2006 and then became the founding member of the Data Analysis Group (DAG).  From March 2011 he switched to work primarily on a joint Wellcome Trust Programme Grant project with Irwin McLean, but remains an associate of the DAG.

David Martin    - Is an Associate Member of the DAG.   David graduated with a degree in Chemistry from Kings College London in 1991. He completed a PhD in protein structure/function at the MRC Clinical Sciences Centre, Hammersmith  in Ted Tuddenham's group before taking up an EMBO postdoctoral fellowship in Oslo. An EU TMR fellowship as part of the GeneQuiz project allowed David to develop his bioinformatics skills and he took the position as Head of the Norwegian EMBNet node  at the University of Oslo in August 1999. Following his move to Dundee in March 2001 David has a broad responsibility to develop bioinformatics support, training and services for the emerging data intensive science that is going on in the School of Life Sciences.  David's scientific interests include genome annotation and data management. He has developed the GOtcha Tool which annotates sequences with GO term.  He also  collects genomes to annotate, preferably ones from nasty organisms such as Malaria and Sleeping Sickness. His interest is in improving the annotations, working out how to tell the annotations have improved (not as easy as you might think) and looking at these anntoations in a systems biology context.

His external interests seem to involve rebuilding cars, houses and boats when he isn't out in the mountains or enjoying family life.  He also plays the clarinet and saxophone but not as well as you'd want to be listening to.

In July 2011 David switched to work primarily on proteomics tasks, but remains an associate of the DAG.

Geoff Barton did his first degree in Biochemistry at the University of Manchester. He then performed Ph.D. research supervised by Mike Sternberg in the Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London before spending two years as an ICRF Fellow working with Chris Rawlings at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund Labs. in London. In 1989 he was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to set up his own group in the Lab of Molecular Biophysics, University of Oxford. From April 1995 until October 1997, Geoff was also Head of Genome Informatics at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics.  

From 1st October 1997-July 2001 Geoff was a Research and Development Team Leader at the EMBL European Bioinformatics Institute.  

From 1st January 1998-July 2001 Geoff was also  head of the European Macromolecular Structure Database at EBI which is  now known as the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe).

From 30th March 2001 Geoff has been Professor of Bioinformatics at the College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee.  Geoff moved to Dundee full-time in July 2001 and is now co-director (with Mike Ferguson) of the Post Genomics and Molecular Interactions Centre.  Geoff also founded the Data Analysis Group in collaboration with the GRE Centre. He is a Fellow of the Society of Biology and Honorary Fellow of the James Hutton Institute.

Geoff used to spend his leisure time working with the Men in Black, he then teamed up with the The Three Musketeers  but  in Oct 2009  joined The Swimmers.  In July 2005 he also discovered tennis.  After finding like-minded musical colleagues,  he revived his love of flute playing, and on 8th May 2010 had the first  musical review of his playing published in The Courier.

DAG Alumni

Manikhandan Mudaliar ("Mani")