Kamile Tamusauskaite

Kamile is a PhD student at the University of Exeter under the supervision of Dr Nicholas Clifton, Professor Jonathan Mill, Professor Jonathan Brown and Dr Eilis Hannon. Prior to this, she obtained a BSc degree in Biomedical Sciences at Brunel University of London, which included a placement year at the National Research Council of Italy, where Kamile analysed the miRNA expression profiles of Fabry disease patients. During her BSc final year, Kamile took on the role of a research assistant at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, where she built theoretical and practical knowledge in next generation sequencing technologies by taking part in the first full-genome sequencing project of SARS-CoV-2 in Lithuania. Recently, she graduated from Imperial College London with an MSc degree in Genomic Medicine. As part of her MSc degree, Kamile undertook a research project at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial, which focused on the purification and characterisation of pA-Tn5 for novel epigenetic/multiomic methods’ development for small samples and single cells. During this time, she developed a keen interest in psychiatric genomics and neuroscience. For her PhD project, she intends to improve and challenge the current literature by modelling the effects of major schizophrenia risk variants in mice and quantifying their effects on the local synaptic translatome as the brain develops, taking advantage of the most recent techniques for electrophysiological characterisation, ribosome profiling, single cell transcriptomics and bioinformatics.