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 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 believes HDR UK offers the perfect programme to develop these skills.