Dr Marcela Uliano da Silva
Year started
2022
Subject
Bioinformatics and Genomics
Fellow Type
Postdoctoral By-Fellows,
Dr Marcela Uliano-Silva is a Senior Bioinformatician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. She works with the Darwin Tree of Life Assembly Team, testing, creating and improving various assembly pipelines to yield chromosome-level genomes for all eukaryotic taxa occurring in Britain and Ireland. She is also part of the Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) and has joined the consortium with her work on the high-quality genome of the two-toed sloth Choloepus didactylus. This work was one of the goals of her Marie Skłodowska Curie PostDoc (IF-Horizon2020) at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW) and Berlin Center for Genomics in Biodiversity Research (BenGendiv), in Berlin, Germany, where she was before she joined the Sanger. Marcela is also a TED Fellow, with whom she promotes science to the general public and acts as an example of women in science. She is very passionate to bring education, safety and opportunities to developing countries especially through science education in conservation and evolutionary genomics. To help ensure the protagonism of scientists sequencing biodiversity in the global south, Dr Uliano-Silva co-chairs the committee in Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) of the Earth Biogenome Project, which aims to produce genomes for all biodiversity on Earth.