Kate Ridout

Dr Kate Ridout is a High-throughput Sequencing Bioinformatician in the Department of Oncology at the University of Oxford. She obtained her D.Phil at Oxford University in the Department of Plant Sciences, working in evolutionary biology and bioinformatics and studying positive selection in protein structures. She then moved to the University of Lausanne in Switzerland to perform postdoctoral research on sex-chromosomes and evolutionary domestication studies in Cannabis Sativa.

Dr Ridout then made the switch to human biology, using whole genome sequencing technologies to better understand human cancers, most notably, Chronic Lymphocytic Leukaemia (CLL). She has become involved in the 100,000 Genomes project run by Genomics England and, using this data, has completed discovery work describing the molecular background to the subtypes of CLL. Her interests are focused on the effects of non-coding regulatory mutations in various cancers, and the use of both non-coding and coding mutations for molecular subtyping and early detection.