Alumni
This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.
After over a decade of contributing to many global genome assembly projects at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, William has now left and is now part of the alumni family. To contact him please use one of the social media links found on this page.
GRIT forms the Sanger Institute division for the Genome Reference Consortium who are tasked with ensuring the human, mouse and zebrafish reference assemblies are biologically relevant by closing gaps, fixing errors and representing complex variation. The team has now extended similar efforts to the international Vertebrate Genomes Project/Earth Biogenome Project, an ambitious project to produce an error-free, near gapless, chromosomal level, haplotyped phase assembly for all ~66,000 vertebrate species on earth.
William is the lead developer of the gEVAL browser, a web based genome browser for evaluating and curating genome assemblies.
He is also currently involved with the UK based Darwin Tree of Life Project, a Wellcome Sanger Institute leading UK-wide initiative to read the genomes of all 60,000 complex species (eukaryotes) in the British Isles.
Besides these large scale genome projects, he has also assisted in the development of reference genomes for many species including 16 mice strains, pig, chicken, various helminth worms and in a previous position the salmon (salmo salar) genome.
With over a decade of experience working on genome assembly projects, his other interests include methods and tools development for visualization, evaluation and improvement of genomic data and its downstream analysis, its use in HPC/cloud environments, and an ongoing interest in strategizing ways for federated analysis of large scale and possible democratization of data.