Update on the Largest Genetic Study of ME – Sonya Chowdhury & Professor Chris Ponting

Sonya is a driven, ambitious CEO of UK health charity Action for M.E. and Non-Executive Director for social housing and house-building organisation, Curo. Sonya was named in the top 100 most influential women in the West in 2018, and has devoted her career to improving the lives of children and adults now while working to secure change for the future. Sonya started her career in statutory social work before moving to the third sector, where she has worked in management roles for the last 15 years, including in a senior role with national children’s charity Barnardo’s, prior to her current CEO role. Sonya has forged collaboration at national and international levels having previously led the government-funded Family Strategic Partnership, which included co-designing and facilitating Innovating Futures, a programme for charity leaders to increase income and reduce dependency on government funding, and currently chairs the International Alliance for M.E. and the Management Group for the £3.2m DecodeME study, an M.E. genetics study delivered in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and a Patient and Public Involvement Group.

Professor Chris Ponting is Chair of Medical Bioinformatics and a Principal Investigator at the MRC Human Genetics Unit, Institute of Genetics and Cancer. Chris started his research in particle physics before moving via biophysics to bioinformatics and genomics. Aside from one year at the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NIH, Bethesda, MD), he pursued his research at the University of Oxford before moving to Edinburgh in 2016. His research group has made substantial contributions to protein science, evolutionary biology, genetics and genomics. Early in his career, he discovered many important protein domain families. He then provided the first evolutionary analyses for mammalian genomes whilst leading protein analysis teams for the human and mouse genome sequencing projects. More recently, his research established that 8.2% of the human genome is constrained, and thus is likely functional.