Tommy is a senior bioinformatician and PhD student in the Sandhu Group. He primarily works with human genetics in an African context using whole genome sequence data from thousands of individuals. His PhD supervisor is Dr Manj Sandhu.
Currently Tommy’s main activity involves the creation of a haplotype reference panel specific to the African continent; i.e. the African Diversity Reference Panel. Prior to this he was involved in the African Genome Variation Project led by Dr Deepti Gurdasani and Dr Manj Sandhu. One of his contributions to this project was writing the program RagTagger, which is scalable for selection of tag SNP across the genome. Tommy is interested in the creation of resources to the scientific community such as reference panels and SNP arrays specific to the African content. He is continually interested in and excited by the field of human genetics and its capacity to make positive contributions to human health.
Tommy has been programming for more than 10 years and enjoys optimising existing methods and coming up with new approaches and methods for efficiently handling and analysing whole genome sequence data. He mostly writes his code in University of Copenhagen and prior to joining the Sandhu Group he operated his own data mining company and had three S&P500 companies as clients.