Marion Shadbolt
Human Genomics Data Specialist, Australian BioCommonsBiography
After completing her Masters of Bioinformatics at the University of Melbourne, Marion set off for Vancouver, Canada in search of experience and adventure. At the Karsan lab at BC Cancer, Marion developed knowledge and expertise in clinical genomic assay development and analysed various sequencing datasets from blood cancer patient samples.
During this experience, Marion encountered frustrating inconsistencies in publicly accessible datasets and gaps in the understanding of FAIR data practices at the research lab level. This sparked Marion’s passion for the importance of good data management and curation practices in the genomics realm.
In 2019, she joined EMBL-EBI to work on the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) project to build her knowledge and experience in this field. As part of the Data Coordination Platform team, she worked with collaborators and research labs to facilitate harmonisation and ingestion of vast quantities of cellular resolution data and metadata. In addition, Marion engaged with the single cell community to develop and maintain the HCA metadata standard and contributed to the development of the data ingestion platform.