Jessica is EMBL’s Head of Strategy, based at EMBL-EBI in Hinxton. She is responsible for developing and shaping EMBL’s strategic planning across its six sites, and has a key role in specific initiatives related to the implementation and execution of the EMBL Programme EMBL’s next five year research plan, due to begin in 2022.
Jessica joined EMBL-EBI in 2016, and since May 2018 has been Head of EMBL-EBI’s Strategic Partnership Office, responsible for strategy development, planning, and EMBL-EBI industry initiatives.
Prior to joining EMBL-EBI, Jessica held several roles at GSK, most recently as the Operations Director for Open Targets, a public-private partnership. Jessica oversaw the management of informatics and experimental target validation projects and ensured the strategic deployment and operational translation of the initiative. Jessica was also a Team Leader in GSK Computational Biology, working with discovery scientists in many therapeutic areas including infectious diseases, respiratory, immuno-inflammation and rare diseases to deliver impactful bioinformatics projects.
She spent over six years at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Maryland, US working on many pathogen genome sequencing projects and a year at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in human genome annotation. She also taught as a Lecturer in Molecular Evolution at University College London.
Jessica holds a PhD in Bioinformatics from University College London, an MSc in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor of Medical Science from the University of Sydney.