Dr Shane A. McCarthy

Tree of Life Assembly Team Lead

Shane is the team lead for the Tree of Life Assembly team and a Senior Research Associate with the Durbin Group in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. Shane has a PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Western Australia. In 2009, he transitioned into bioinformatics and became heavily involved in large scale human genome sequencing projects like 1000 Genomes, UK10K and the Haplotype Reference Consortium. With the reduction in cost of long read sequencing, Shane started working on genome assembly projects, starting with the Vertebrate Genomes Project and Sanger 25 Genomes Project and leading to the formation of the Sanger Tree of Life Programme and launch of the Darwin Tree of Life Project.

My timeline

• Tree of Life Assembly Team Lead, Sanger

• Senior Research Associate, Dept of Genetics, University of Cambridge

• Vertebrate Resequencing Team Lead, Sanger

• Principal Bioinformatician, Vertebrate Resequencing, Sanger

• UK10K Project Production Co-Chair

• Senior Bioinformatician, Vertebrate Resequencing, Sanger

• MPhil in Computational Biology, University of Cambridge

• Research Associate, Institute for Research in Electronics and Applied Physics, University of Maryland

• Research Associate, Center for String and Particle Theory, University of Maryland

• PhD in Physics, University of Western Australia

• BSc (Hons) in Physics and Pure Mathematics, University of Western Autralia