Rachel Williams

Rachel Williams leads the sequencing and bioinformatics team in the Public Helath surveillance lab at Bangor University. She gained her PhD in Biology in 2015 from Lancaster University, where her thesis focussed the evolutionary biology and demography of the Indo-Pacific cephalopod, Nautilus pompilius. She looked at population connectivity between reefs around Australia and the Philippines, with a focus on the impacts of overfishing. Following this she was a post-doc at Duke University in North Carolina. She used comparative genomics to look at the evolutionary history of Madagascar’s threatened Dwarf lemurs, identifying ancient admixture between lineages, and estimating genetic diversity in isolated populations. Her interest in applied research led her to join the wastewater monitoring team at Bangor where she developed and optimised the sequencing protocols for SARS-CoV-2 and other viruses. Rachel also developed the active collaboration with Nimagen in the Netherlands to develop new sequencing protocols used in the national surveillance programme.