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 just completed her PhD based at the University of Edinburgh, co-supervised by Dr. Chris Ponting, Dr. Ava Khamseh and Dr. Sjoerd Beentjes. Her project focused on understanding the molecular mechanisms that contribute to complex traits. She analyzed genomic data from ChIP-sequencing experiments to predict variants that alter transcription factor binding, and further asked whether these variants explain disease risk in large genomic cohorts. These variant-trait relationships were 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 applied this to data from the UK Biobank, investigating whether genetic interactions (i.e. epistasis) contributed to disease severity across 768 phenotypic traits.
Breeshey is now beginning a Postdoctoral research fellowship at EMBL-EBI, working with Dr. Ewan Birney and Dr. Tomas Fitzgerald to investigate structural variants and methylation patterns in the 1000 Genomes cohort, using Oxford nanopore long read sequencing data. 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.
Breeshey has a particular interest in data integration from a mechanistic point-of-view and hopes to leverage her foundation in biology and data science to develop unique ways of integrating different types of genomic data. She is taking part in the HDR UK mentoring programme in 2024/2025, and is very excited to meet her fellow mentors/mentees!
