Dr Jaine Blayney studied Maths at Somerville College, Oxford, Computing and Info Systems then Bioinformatics at Ulster University.  She has spent 15 years working with charities, in advice, training and counselling.

Dr Blayney currently works at Queen's University Belfast as a Lecturer in Translational Bioinformatics and is Course Director for MSc Bioinformatics/Computational Genomics.

Dr Blayney uses mathematics, statistics and computing in biomedical research to uncover new biological insights from patient data.  She is particularly interested in separation of patients into different subgroups, based on the complex biological patterns found in tissue or blood samples, which can help speed up treatment response and patient recovery. Just as there is not a one-treatment fits all, different patient data may require the application of different statistical modelling or machine learning techniques. 

2019 awards:

• @WITAwardsDublin (All-Ireland Women in Tech, Data Scientist)
• @WATC_WeAreTech (All-UK WeAreTEch TechWomen100)
• British Computer Society NI IT Professional of the Year

Dr Sophia Halliday is a Bioinformatician at Trinity College Dublin. She has a strong background in analytics, with a Masters degree in Mathematics and a PhD in Medical Statistics from Queen’s University, Belfast.

Dr Halliday’s first Research Fellowship was within the Centre for Public Health with funding from Diabetes UK, where she used deep learning and neural networks to define diabetic eye diseases within the Northern Irish population. She is currently working on prostate cancer research, specifically genetic analysis within multiple platforms and tissue types.