Since July 2017 I am Professor and Director of the Centre for Tropical Livestock Genetics and Health at the University of Edinburgh. I recently completed an 8 years tenure as Technology Manager and Director of Biosciences eastern and central Africa (BecA, Kenya) with leadership, management and research roles. Earlier research activities (spanning ~10 years) in the USA at Yale University School of Medicine and at the J Craig Venter Institute (formerly The Institute for Genomic Research, TIGR) focused on the following areas: RNA processing, regulation of gene expression, functional genomics and viral (meta)genomics. i completed a PhD and graduated from the Department of Biochemistry at Brunel University (London, UK) based on a research work conducted in the area of Parasite Genomics working on the sequencing and (functional) annotation of the genome of African trypanosomes.