Dr. Karen Sherwood, Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dr. Karen Sherwood received her B.Sc with honours in biotechnology (2004) and on receiving a Postgraduate Scholarship, completed her Ph.D. (2008) from the Department of Medicine and Infectious Diseases centre at the University of Edinburgh. Her Ph.D. research focused on defining the parameters for transcriptional analysis of the variant Creutzfeldt Jakobs Disease (vCJD) human brain and identifying transcriptional changes involved in the pathogenic mechanisms of vCJD. With the support and funding from the Chief Scientists Office in Scotland, Dr. Sherwood was able to expand her Ph.D. research into her first post-doctoral postion, where the research focused on high-throughput sequencing of the vCJD diseased human brain, of both the transcriptome and the microRNAome.  During this time, she was accepted onto the Wellcome Trust Advanced Courses for Functional Genomics and Systems Biology as well as participating in the Working with the Human Genome Sequence workshop. These opportunities have allowed Dr. Sherwood to develop her training in bioinformatics and data analysis, as well as work with experts in the newly emerging field of systems biology and integrative networks. She has published first-author publications in peer-reviewed journals including Neuropathology and Applied Neurobiology. In her role with the PROOF Centre, Dr. Sherwood will be involved with the COPD biomarker discovery program, where she will employ both computational and bench experiment techniques to uncover biological mechanisms of exacerbations.