Dr Rebecca A Gladstone

Senior Bioinformatician

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

I am now based at the University of Oslo (see quick links) and retain visiting worker status at the Wellcome Sanger Institute working with Prof Jukka Corander.

Interests: Microbial genomics, population genomics, AMR, vaccine impact

Role in the GPS project

Between 2013 and 2019 I was senior bioinformatician for the Global pneumococcal sequencing project AKA GPS (tweets as @pneumowatch). GPS is sequencing the genomes of over 20,000 Streptococcus pneumoniae, collected from around the globe focusing on the developing world where the burden of disease is often highest. The collection covers both disease and carriage isolates from children and adults from before during and after post pneumococcal conjugate vaccine. GPS aims to assess vaccine impact on the bacterial population structure, resistance and capsular switching, and further describe gene content, recombination and phylogeography. I also regularly got involved in a number of other collaborative pneumococcal projects that are sequenced at The Sanger Institute and have a general interest in infectious disease epidemiology. I have come from a microbiology background, acquiring bioinformatic skills during my PhD at the University of Southampton studying 500 pneumococcal genomes.