Barney Hill

Currently based at Merton College, figuring out what to study for my DPhil. Here's what i'm thinking about:

Approximately 80% of rare disease cases are expected to have a genetic cause yet only ~40% recieve a causal diagnosis. What are some genetic causes of rare disease which would be both recurrent but hard to identify with linear association? How can we identify these patterns?
A recent paper identified a genetic disease that did not manifest in East Asian individuals due to a second rescuing population variant. Is it possible there are undiscovered genetic diseases caused by the presence of two interacting variants? How might we prioritise likely damaging variant combinations to minimise multiple-testing correction?
Ancestral Recombination Graphs (ARGs) are highly effective for modelling genetic variation in populations yet their inference in large biobanks remains challenging. Could we reframe ARG inference as a differentiable optimisation problem to be massively parallelised on GPUs?
The MHRA has approved the first CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing therapy. Despite this concerns remain about off-target editing which may be specific to individual's genetic variation. Could we build a cost-effective method to evaluate off-target effects for every patient before dosage?

If you've also thought about any of these problems please do reach out!

where i've worked