About
I’ve been doing bioinformatics since 2000, starting with a master’s degree and then on to my PhD, both at the University of Manchester. I have been a visiting scholar or worked at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. I had the priviledge to serve as the Inaugural Chair of the International Society for Computational Biology Student Council.
Research Interests
1) Transcriptomics, Epigenomics and Gene Regulation
As part of my role as Project Leader for Plant and Animal Genomes at my institute, I am very involved in the in the analysis, annotation and interpretation of Next Generation Sequence data. I oversee the computation and management of data that allows interpretation of genome-wide analyses of transcribed cDNA, methylation patterns and transcription binding sites. This consists primarily of running computationally intensive pipelines on raw data coming from RNA-seq, Bisulphate and ChIP-seq experiments. Types of species I have been working with include Ricinus communis, Tomato and Chicken.
2) Personal Genomics
My involvement in personal genomics originated as an attempt to know myself better. I started genotyping myself and soon after I co-developed a visualization tool for personal genomes, myKaryoView. My family then was genotyped and in an unprecedented move we published our personal genotypes for anyone to download. This move made such an impact that I was contacted by researchers around the globe who reported back their interesting findings about my family. More recently, I have sequenced of my personal exome and published it in its entirety online.
Educational Background
- 2002-2007 PhD Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK
- 2000-2001 MSc Computational Molecular Biology, University of Manchester, UK
- 1999-2000 Erasmus program, University of Southampton, UK
- 1995-1999 Licenciatura en Ciencias Biológicas, Especialidad Biosanitaria, Universidad de Navarra, Spain
Honors/Awards
- Manuel Corpas’ Blog voted among the top 15 Bioinformatics Blogs in 2010 by Novoseek
- International Society for Computational Biology Board of Directors (2005, 2007, 2008)
- International Society for Computational Biology Student Council Founder (2004).
- World Universities Network fellowship, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Protein Data Bank (2003)
- PhD studentship, Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, UK (2002).
- Collaborative European project, grant QLG2-CT-2002-1298. Towards a unified theory of protein structural fragments and their application for protein engineering and misfolding related diseases (2002).
- Socrates-Erasmus. Exchange year at the University of Southampton, UK (1999).
Feature: A Personal View of Personal Genomics
Manuel talks about his personal journey into the depths of his genome and the genomes of his family.
