This month, we meet Ivana Piližota, who joined the Ensembl Compara team in 2020. She tells us how her everyday work life looks like and what sparked her interest in bioinformatics.

When did you join and what is your job in Ensembl?

I joined the Ensembl Comparative Genomics team in December 2020 as a Bioinformatics Developer. We are the team behind all gene trees, homologies, gene families, whole genome alignments, syntenies and ancestral sequences in Ensembl. I am involved in running Ensembl Compara code on the sets of genomes to produce the data which is directly available to the users. The rest of the time I write new code and do various analyses and benchmarks.

What do you enjoy about your job?

Diversity of the projects I work on, interactive and collaborative environment, the positive atmosphere and availability of resources at EMBL-EBI naturally lead to learning new things on a daily basis which is of great importance to me. Equally important, helping the community to unlock the potential of biological data feels rewarding and keeps me motivated.

How did you get into bioinformatics?

I love this question! My first love was mathematics and I knew at an early age that I wanted to study it at university. I never saw myself doing pure mathematics and learning about genetics in school sparkled my interest in biology. During my bachelor studies in mathematics, I was exploring the ideas of getting into biological applications either via probability and statistics or differential equations. Much stronger liking for the former led me to a masters degree in statistics. I did courses and internships in bioinformatics, liked the multi-disciplinarity of the field and felt that it could keep me curious for many years to come.

What surprised you the most about Ensembl when you started working here?

The size and complexity of the project! No wonder—soon, more and more new employees will be younger than Ensembl! 😄

What did you do before joining Ensembl?

I did a PhD in bioinformatics at University College London (UCL) in collaboration with Bayer Crop Science, Belgium. At UCL, I was a member of Dessimoz Lab where I was mainly working on homology inference and phylogenetic methods to improve genome annotations. Dr Christophe Dessimoz and his team have been developing and maintaining OMA, an orthology database, and I am very grateful for starting my comparative genomics journey with them. 

If you could meet your younger self five years ago, what advice would you give yourself?

Fear less.