John Marioni was Head of Research at EMBL-EBI from March 2021 to September 2022 and is now Senior Vice President and Head of Computation at Genentech Research and Early Development (gRED) in South San Francisco.
He remains heavily involved in the scientific organisation and governance of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project where he sits on the Organising Committee (OC) and co-chairs the HCA Analysis Working Group (AWG).
John joined EMBL-EBI as Research Group Leader in Computational and Evolutionary Genomics in 2010. His group develops the computational and statistical tools necessary to exploit high-throughput genomics data, with the aim of understanding the regulation of gene expression and modelling developmental and evolutionary processes. Within this context, the Marioni group focuses on understanding how the divergence of gene expression levels is regulated, using gene expression as a definition of the molecular fingerprint of individual cells to study the evolution of cell types, and modelling spatial variability in gene-expression levels within a tissue or organism.
John obtained his PhD in Applied Mathematics in the University of Cambridge in 2008 and did his postdoctoral research in the Department of Human Genetics, University of Chicago.