Elilan Somaskantharajah

Elilan is an advanced research assistant for MalariaGEN based at Sanger. He is involved in MalariaGEN Consortial Projects 1 and 3 with main emphasis on testing and developing next generation sequencing techniques for Consortial Project 3. He has also made a major contribution toward verification of sequence variants in the pilot phase of Consortial Project 3. Elilan also supports the Plasmodium Genome Variation project and other laboratory activities in the Kwiatkowski group at Sanger.

Elilan completed his undergraduate degree in biomedical sciences at the University of London before joining the Health Protection Agency as a biochemist, where he was involved in developing therapeutics against cancer cells. His interest in genetics next brought Elilan to Sanger. Before joining the Kwiatkowski team and MalariaGEN, Elilan worked in the ExoSeq team was involved in resequencing exonic regions of genes with medical relevance.