After my PhD I did a post-doc, also in Leicester, on the natural variation at human teleomeres on chromosomes 7 and 12.

I then had a year out which I spent mostly in the Texas and once back in England began pursuing an exciting career in retail management. I decided to go back to the bench in 1998 and did an NHS funded post-doc looking at mutation detection in patients with the bone disease hypophosphatsia.

My third and final post-doc was working on the hereditary heart disease PPH (primary pulmonary hypertension), as part of the international PPH consortium. I performed candidate gene analysis by mostly by HPLC, for genes lying within the critical interval. This involved an increasing amount of bioinformatics as the critical interval was being sequenced faster that the PPH consortium could perform candidate gene analysis. After having developed an interest in bioinformatics I left that post-doc to join EMBL as a curator for the EMBL database in February 2000.

EMBL database curators review and prepare entries for inclusion in the database.

Since leaving the bench, stopping PCR, and moving to Cambridge I find I have far more free time and I am now working on ways to fill this.