Breeshey Roskams-Hieter

Breeshey began her journey into the quantitative sciences during her bachelor’s degree, where she was fascinated by the intersection of biology, mathematics and computer science. This drove her to pursue a degree in quantitative biology and mathematics at McGill University, where she gained a unique perspective on tackling research problems, and allowed her to approach them in new and innovative ways.

Her first experience in hands-on research included working with genome-wide association studies and integrating this with publicly-available ChIP-sequencing data to predict novel risk loci in different inflammatory diseases. This allowed her to establish a strong foundation in data processing and analysis, pipeline development and data integration.

This naturally led into her work at Oregon Health and Science University, where she focused on identifying classifying RNA biomarkers for different cancer types using liquid biopsy methods and cell-free RNA-sequencing. This fed her interest for pursuing research in disease progression and detection, and led her to the HDR UK-Turing PhD programme, where she hopes to make her mark in the world of health data research.

Breeshey is currently based at the University of Edinburgh, co-supervised by Dr. Chris Ponting, Dr. Ava Khamseh and Dr. Sjoerd Beentjes. Her project focuses on understanding the molecular mechanisms that contribute to complex traits. She analyzes genomic data from ChIP-sequencing experiments to predict variants that alter transcription factor binding, and further asks whether these variants explain disease risk in large genomic cohorts. These variant-trait relationships are modeled using causal inference methods and targeted learning, which aims to avoid limitations present in classical genome-wide association studies due to model mis-specification. She is currently applying this to the GenOMICC cohort to ask whether epistatic interactions contribute to disease severity for critical COVID-19, and hopes to apply this across all traits in the UK BioBank.

Breeshey also works part-time at Singula Bio, a biotechnology company based out of Oxford University, as a computational biologist. Here she assists with analyses for predicting neoantigens that aid in precision oncology for ovarian cancer patients.