Jim Downie
Senior Bioinformatician In The Tree Of Life Assembly Team
South Cambridgeshire, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolJim Downie is a Senior Bioinformatician with a decade of experience melding microbial ecology, computational biology, and Bayesian statistics to turn complex ecological datasets into actionable insights. Currently on the Tree of Life Assembly team at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, he brings hands-on expertise in microbiome analysis from a UK-wide oak microbiome survey and a PhD in evolutionary ecology. Fluent in R and experienced with Stan, Jim combines rigorous statistical modelling (GLMMs, ordination, spatial analysis) with practical bioinformatics to identify biomarkers and environmental drivers of host health. He has moved between academia and industry roles—postdoc, data scientist, and now senior bioinformatics—demonstrating rapid learning and collaborative delivery. Colleagues rely on him for thoughtful experimental design and reproducible analysis pipelines that translate ecological theory into real-world conservation and health outcomes.
10 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MSc Computational Methods in Ecology and Evolution, Master of Science - MSc Computational Methods in Ecology and Evolution at Imperial College LondonHNC Software Engineering, HNC Software Engineering at Langside CollegeDoctor of Philosophy - PhD Evolutionary Ecology, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD Evolutionary Ecology at The University of EdinburghBachelor of Science - BSc (Hons) Plant Biology, Bachelor of Science - BSc (Hons) Plant Biology at University of AberdeenAdvanced Highers, Advanced Highers at Shawlands Academy
English, Greek
Github Skills (98)
testing10
microbiome10
genome-assembly10
linting10
genomics10
nf-core10
binning10
nextflow10
pipeline10
sequencing10
metagenomics10
assembly10
test-data10
bioinformatics10
illumina10
Programming languages (17)
Github contributions (5)
prototaxites/modules
Dec 2024 - May 2026
Repository to host tool-specific module files for the Nextflow DSL2 community!
Contributions:245 pushes, 85 branches in 1 year 4 months
sanger-tol/metagenomeassembly
Nov 2024 - May 2026
A Nextflow pipeline for the assembly and binning of metagenomes from PacBio HiFi and Illumina Hi-C sequencing data.
Contributions:6 releases, 11 reviews, 56 PRs in 1 year 6 months
binningilluminanextflowsequencingpipeline
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