Oliver Smith

PhD Student

Wellcome Sanger Institute

Biography

I am a PhD student at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. I am currently doing rotations in the Generative and Synthetic Genomics and Cancer, Ageing and Somatic Mutation programmes. Prior to Cambridge I was a Senior Technical Officer at the Australian National University for two years, and completed a Bachelor of Philosophy - Science (Honours) in at the Australian National University in Chemistry and Biology. My scientific background is in protein engineering, biophysics, materials science, chemical and synthetic biology and bioinformatics.

Research

I am interested in working on approaches to map the mutagenic landscapes of protein-coding genes in both reconstituted systems and their endogenous genomic context. Broadly, I am interested in developing and applying methods to generate high-content phenotypic data at scales similar to the Protein Data Bank, combining genome-scale mutagenesis, phenotype measurement and computational approaches. I want to use these datasets to build comprehensive mutation-phenotype models that bridge sequence-level variation and cellular effects. I am especially interested in focussing on technically challenging or understudied human targets such as membrane proteins and intrinsically disordered proteins. I am very excited about using my background in biochemistry to bring molecular focus to genome-level experimental approaches and datasets during my PhD.