GB is a private company based in Reading, UK. It was founded in 2004 by Dr Liz Reynolds who identified the need for specialists who could deliver expert bioinformatics services within corporate settings.
From its inception, GB has provided custom services that are not tied to specific products but instead focus on the challenges of using bioinformatics effectively in each client’s corporate research world.
GB staff have a scientific background in either post-doc research or bioinformatics. This broad range of expertise makes our service relevant to a wide variety of customer challenges, it is outcome focussed not product centric, and is backed up with strong technological capability. We build long lasting relationships with our clients, meeting a variety of their needs, being with them as their businesses evolve and as bioinformatics changes.
Where we need to supplement on our in-house expertise we reach out to our network of affiliates who bring world recognised domain specific knowledge.
Read our biogs:
Stephanie Widdison, Delivery Manager
Dan Stein, Engineering Manager
Chris Bishop, Principal Engineer
Joanna Parmley, Bioinformatics Developer
Mike Way, Bioinformatics Consultant
Rosanna Joyce, Bioinformatics Consultant
Ellie Carr, Bioinformatics Consultant
Nitin Kumar, Bioinformatics Consultant
Liz leads the strategic direction of the company, working alongside clients to ensure that we understand and meet their business needs and scientific requirements. She provides advice to government funding bodies and is a recognised industry expert in the field. From her background in diverse research organisations Liz integrates extensive bioinformatics knowledge with scientific, IT and business insight to maximize the value of bioinformatics data and tools in a corporate research context.
Stephanie runs the customer facing deliveries of GB services including analysis support to science, and application and data deployments to scientists. Stephanie is an expert in NGS approaches for non-model organism genomics and bioinformatics methods to support research into Lead Generation and Mode of Action and Resistance Research. She provides custom support to research organisations including interaction with scientists, recommending data and methods, providing bespoke analyses, and delivering user training. Stephanie has a scientific background in Immunology and Molecular Biology in both human and animal disease.
Ken divides his time between managing GB’s IT infrastructure, performing large-scale bioinformatic analyses and rapid solution deployment. He has extensive experience in managing data, tools and pipeline automation for genomic analyses, with a focus on customer proprietary data. Originally a research scientist in the fields of Immunology and Protein Engineering, he has nearly twenty-five years of experience in providing bioinformatics platforms for large research organisations.
Dan heads up development at GB, coordinating application and architecture design. Dan is the founder of several small successful startups, having won awards for his work designing machine learning applications in the ed-tech space and most recently AI and recommender systems for GLG Group. He also has a couple of number one records under his belt!
Chris is a development engineer at GB. He is a founder of a successful software consultancy firm and has worked on a wide range of projects from in-flight entertainment to situational awareness systems. He recently worked on an award winning learning record store. He is also a pilot.
Our infrastructure lead is an expert in dev-ops and infrastructure management having worked with many household-name infrastructure clients. Prior experience involved maintaining single, multi tenant and on-prem architecture designs for a range of companies, from small startups right through to global multi-region organisations. This role requires a deep understanding of networking, CICD and security both on-prem and in the cloud. GB’s infrastructure lead is responsible for deploying and maintaining systems, databases and telemetry for our many applications and tools.
Joanna leads our data design, standardisation and integration services. This requires deep knowledge of a diverse range of public data sources, their structure and inter-relationships and expertise in integration technologies, particularly RDF. Her client work focuses on the integration and management of proprietary data alongside public data, preparation of bespoke data packages and large-scale data extraction. Joanna has a background in genetics and comparative genomics.
Mike provides curation and analysis of integrated biological data to support research, encompassing managing large sequence data sets and the annotation of sequencing data such as genomes. Mike also works with the development team to create user-friendly tools to enable scientists to easily access these data. Before starting his role at GB, Mike worked in scientific research completing a BSc and PhD in Biochemistry and Population Genetics respectively.
Rosanna provides bioinformatics support to research scientists including gene model annotation and data standardisation. She also supports NGS analyses and target elucidation. Her research background is in molecular biology, NGS analysis pipeline development and computational prediction of bacterial drug targets.
Ellie supplies bioinformatics support to scientists, primarily in the analysis of NGS data for the identification of mode of action, resistance, lead generation and target elucidation. She is also involved in genomic data standardisation and deployment. Ellie has completed a BSc (Hons) in Biological Sciences (Molecular Genetics) and an MSc in Bioinformatics, with research experience in agricultural genomics.
Nitin supplies bioinformatics support to scientists, primarily in the analysis of NGS data for the identification of mode of action, resistance, lead generation and target elucidation. Nitin was previously at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where he worked as a senior bioinformatician. In that role he applied whole genome sequencing and NGS data analysis to track bacterial transmission within a hospital setting, and to understand adaptations of pathogenic intestinal bacteria in response to diet and the hospital environment.
Daisy supplies bioinformatics support to scientists, primarily in the analysis of NGS data for the identification of mode of action, resistance, lead generation and target elucidation. Daisy's broad background includes eco-immunology and mathematical modelling of resistance to disease in non-model organisms, as well as the effects of ecological perturbation on the population genetic structure of wild insects. She also has experience optimizing long-read sequencing technologies and in silico approaches to the study the dissemination of antimicrobial resistance.
Katrina does all the administration for the company including the book keeping processes.
Jim has been chairman of the company since its inception in 2005. A senior executive from the IT and Telecoms industry with extensive experience in technology, marketing and operations, he has a track record up to board level in large corporate environments as well as start-up companies in the US and Europe. He is sought after for discussions with senior management in our clients about the direction of bioinformatics in science research.
The GB affiliates network is a set of academic and industry experts with whom GB collaborates in order to provide cutting edge skills and expertise and strengthen our service offering.
With this affiliate network, GB can provide clients with comprehensive expertise and knowledge in specific areas with specialists and academic authorities.
GB is always ready to work with new affiliates and permanent staff who share our ambitions to deliver excellence in Bioinformatics services. We are especially happy to hear from people who believe that they have specialist skills that are ready to be deployed into the world of science.