Katja Kivinen

Katja is a project manager for MalariaGEN based at Sanger. She manages MalariaGEN operations at Sanger and jointly oversees the Kwiatkowski team's laboratory there. Katja works closely with Dominic and Kirk to set study priorities and timelines, with the main objective of keeping progress of MalariaGEN consortial projects 1 and 3 on track.

Her team acts as the interface between MalariaGEN and the Sanger Institute's genotyping and sequencing core facilities. They test and optimise protocols for DNA handling and sample preparation, and interact regularly with Sanger sequencing, genotyping and informatics teams to identify and resolve potential roadblocks before they slow down progress of consortial projects.

Katja focused on genetics and microbiology in her MSc from Helsinki University. After performing structural and computational analyses for two years in a governmental institute, she received a predoctoral fellowship from European Molecular Biology Laboratory to do a PhD in Bioinformatics at Cambridge University. Her thesis work was carried out at European Bioinformatics Institute, and consisted of developing computational approaches to identify gene regulatory sites in yeasts.

After graduation, Katja spent two years at Karolinska Institute (Sweden) as a senior bioinformatician in medical genetics. She returned to Cambridge in 2006 to take a position as a senior computational biologist at Sanger before joining the Kwiatkowski team and the MalariaGEN consortium.