This week we turn our attention to another of our valuable team members, our Bioinformatician and “crazy dog lady”, Ellen Schofield. Ellen joined our group back in 2016 when we were still based at the Animal Health Trust and moved with the team to Cambridge in 2021. We talked to Ellen about her work, and learn about how she came to find a job that, simply put, seems made for her!
Ellen, like most young animal-lovers, grew up wanting to be a Vet – she was dog (and horse) obsessed from a young age. Ellen got her first dog of her own, a Border Collie, in 1996, having spent her whole life having family cocker spaniels. Having never been allowed a horse, her dogs became her horses, and naturally she got well and truly bitten by the dog agility bug! She joined the Young Kennel Club and attended YKC Camps for many years as well as stewarding and competing at Crufts. Unfortunately six rejections from Vet School saw Ellen have a re-think on her future career and she elected to do a Molecular Biology & Biochemistry degree instead, having loved genetics at A-level. Towards the end of her undergraduate degree she found Bioinformatics – a (then) exploding interdisciplinary field that encompasses Biology, Mathematics and Computing – and the seeds of her new career path were sown. After graduation dogs 2, 3 and 4 were added to her life, agility continued (as well as finding the newer sport of Flyball) and she undertook jobs at the Sanger Institute and University of Cambridge, working in pathogen and then human diabetes genetics. In 2001 she visited the AHT with her Border Collie (then 5) for a BAER hearing test, to find out she was bilaterally deaf due to what we now know to be Adult Onset Deafness (AOD) in the Border Collie.
In 2016 the “Give a Dog a Genome” project was launched jointly between the AHT and the Kennel Club, with the aim to whole-genome sequence (WGS) 50 different breeds of dog. Given the anticipated volume of data generated by this project and future initiatives, the involvement of a Bioinformatician became essential, and so Ellen joined the Canine Genetics Centre, where she became the craziest of the dog-crazy team! On a day-to-day basis Ellen deals with our WGS data, develops and maintains our websites/social presence as well as developing better analysis pipelines for finding potential disease-causing variants in our databank of >450 genome sequences. She is also our resident canine coat colour genetics geek – how she gets her head round (and remembers) all those interactions we aren’t quite sure!
As a hobby-breeder and dog sports fanatic, Ellen is truly passionate about breeding dogs that are healthy and “fit for function”, and her job – using computers to find disease-causing variants – means she can still help animals, just like her 5-year old self always wanted to do! She has a personal passion for our Intervertebral Disc Disease (IVDD) research, especially in the Cocker Spaniel with how it affects these dogs in sports; and she is always closely following the AOD research that one of our collaborators is undertaking at the University of Helsinki.
Ellen currently has 9 dogs at home (2 Border Collies, 3 Cocker Spaniels, a Miniature American Shepherd, a Labrador and two purpose-breed “sports-mixes”) and breeds the odd litter under her KC affixes, primarily for sports as well as being the team captain of one of the current top Flyball teams in the world! Between her professional life and her undeniable love for dogs, she doesn’t just earn the title of “crazy dog lady”— we think she defines it!
