Dr Emily Clark

Reader/Research Group Leader

Background

My undergraduate degree was in Animal Biology at the University of St Andrews where I stayed to do a masters in quantitative biology before moving to the University of Dundee and James Hutton Institute for my PhD in molecular phylogenetics. I then continued similar phylogenetics work at the Royal Veterinary College as a post doc, this time in the poultry parasite Eimeria. After 3 years at the RVC I moved to become a Research Fellow in livestock functional genomics and transcriptomics at The Roslin Institute where I led the BBSRC funded Sheep Gene Expression Atlas Project. The main focus of the project was to analyse gene expression across a wide range of different tissues and cell types from multiple developmental stages from sheep using RNA-Sequencing. The Sheep Gene Expression Atlas is a key contribution to the international Functional Annotation of Animal Genomes (FAANG) initiative. In 2017 I was appointed a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh to continue work on functional genomics in livestock at the Roslin Institute and within the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health and was promoted more recently to Reader/Research Group Leader. I currently co-coordinate the EuroFAANG Research Infrastructure Project and my research group generates data for genome annotation projects for sheep and pigs contributing to resources available to domestic animals on the Ensemble Genome Browser.

Qualifications

2006 Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Dundee Molecular characterisation of the bacteria associated with the Cabbage Aphid

2005 Master of Research, University of St Andrews

2001 Bachelor of Science (Honours), University of St Andrews

Responsibilities & affiliations

Associate Editor Genomics

Associate Editor G3:Genes,Genomes,Genetics

 

Research summary

My main research interests focus on transcriptomics and genomics in farmed animals in both temperate and tropical regions. I am particularly interested in functional annotation of farmed animal genomes and the transcriptional control of complex traits in small ruminants.