My name is Daniel Swan (you can call me Dan if you prefer).
I am a bioinformatician and geek. I live in Oxford where I work for Oxford Gene Technology as a Senior Computational Biologist. I’ve been here since July 2011 doing next-generation sequence work in the company.
Formerly I ran the Bioinformatics Support Unit at Newcastle University which is now in the very safe hands of Simon Cockell
My work background is in molecular developmental biology as both a PhD student (Imperial College, London) and a postdoc (Edinburgh University).
My first bioinformatics position was at The Genome Centre at Barts and The London Queen Mary’s School of Medicine and Dentistry in 2001 where I focused on supporting clinical genomic investigations into complex human conditions such as obesity and diabetes.
In 2003 I moved to the NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre (formerly the Enironmental Genomics Thematic Data Centre or EGTDC) supporting environmental genomics and post-genomic investigations, as well as developing the bioinformatics focused Linux distribution known as Bio-Linux.
In 2005 I took up a position at Newcastle University to set up the Bioinformatics Support Unit. My primary focus was next generation sequencing/genomics and transcriptomics/microarray analysis but I collaborated widely within other fields such as neuroinformatics, systems and synthetic biology.