My PhD project at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands, was in developmental genetics. I mapped genes in the critical deletion region of the Chromosome 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrome family of neural crest associated syndromes and assessed their disease candidate status.

I started my post-graduate career in the Havana group at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK, annotating human, mouse and various other genomes. We created evidence-supported gene/transcript models and associated features for those genomes, which were then published through the Vega and Ensembl genome browsers and many other genomic resources.

After 18 years at the WTSI I moved to the Alleles and Phenotypes group in the MGI department at the Jackson Laboratory where we mine scientific literature for the description of mouse alleles and associated phenotype and disease descriptions. This data is then entered in our MGI database and from there becomes available through many other resources.