Dr Konrad Paszkiewicz

Konrad is the Director of the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Informatics Hub. He is not employed by the Hub but is there to steer it.

He has been the Head of the Sequencing Service at the University of Exeter since 2008.

Konrad is a bioinformatician who originally trained as a physicist. His interest in biology was sparked by a stint in a bio-physics wet-lab during his undergraduate years trying to clone genes and purify proteins. Despite the inevitable failures he said he learned more during six months in biology than he had in most of his physics degree.

He also learned humility and a respect for the difficulties that wet-lab scientists endure in trying to carry through their experiments. He carries those lessons through to his work with the Wellcome Trust Biomedical Informatics Hub.

Konrad went on to complete an MSc and PhD in Bioinformatics courtesy of the Medical Research Council at Imperial College, London under Prof Mike Sternberg. He had a chance to play with proteins in the dry lab and see how they behaved under simulated (and very simplified) conditions. He also had his first encounter with an excellent and helpful Bioinformatics Support Service run by Dr Sarah Butcher and her team at Imperial.

After a couple of years running his own business he returned to the academic fold with Profs David Melzer and Tim Frayling at Exeter Medical School where he learnt how to deal with Genome Wide Association Studies and NGS data.

Konrad's personal research interests have many threads. Most are concerned with basic questions - how does DNA interact over long distances? How is such a density of information unpacked and read at the correct time? How do bacteria become virulent and which genes and pathways are critical for this? How is this affected by their environment?

Other questions are concerned with how to make a bioinformatics core run efficiently. This means he keeps a close-eye on the latest software developments as well as best practice. Others are concerned with running a smooth and effective lab.