Mallory Freeberg

Mallory is Coordinator for the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), the controlled access resource for managing sensitive human data jointly run by EMBL-EBI and the Centre for Genomic Regulation. In her role, she is responsible for overall delivery of EGA services and coordinating the EGA roadmap with external project partners. Prior to becoming Coordinator, Mallory was the EGA Project Lead for coordinating the archiving and distribution of whole genome sequencing data from the UK Biobank resource. Mallory joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as part of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Data Coordination Platform team, where she developed the HCA metadata standard and worked closely with data generators to submit the first single cell sequencing datasets to the HCA.

After completing her Bachelor of Science degree in Bioinformatics at Saint Vincent College, Mallory earned her PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan studying post-transcriptional gene regulation in the model organisms C. elegans (nematode) and S. cerevisiae (budding yeast). In nematodes she studied mechanisms and expression of small, regulatory RNAs including microRNAs and germline-specific piRNAs. In both nematodes and budding yeast she studied protein:RNA interactions and how they contribute to post-transcriptional gene regulation. Mallory then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, continuing her exploration of protein:RNA interactions. Additionally, she piloted experiments to directly sequence full-length messenger RNAs in nematodes to explore the diversity of the nematode transcriptome.