Shannan spent the first three months of 2023 at Sanger with Steve as part of a placement scheme for her MRC London Intercollegiate Doctoral Training Partnership PhD programme.

Aiming to gain some analytical and bioinformatics skills and do “a bit of pop gen”, Shannon worked on genome sequencing data from a large cohort of Haemonchus contortus larvae to determine genetic relationships between individuals. Diving right in, Shannan picked up bioinformatics and data wrangling really quickly, and although she didn’t quite finish what we had initially planned (it was ambitious!), she made great progress with the data and revealed some unexpected but really interesting patterns of genetic relationships that we need to dig into deeper.

Shannan is back home in London, where is is undertaking her PhD studies at the London School of Hygeine & Tropical Medicine and Natural History Museum on amplicon and genome sequencing approaches to understand praziquantel resistance in Schistosoma mansoni populations of Uganda.