Mallory Freeberg

Mallory leads the Human Genomics Team which provides genome variation and regulation resources as part of the Ensembl project including the Ensembl Variant Effect Predictor (VEP) tool, as well as human variation interpretation services such as the DECIPHER and Gene2Phenotype platforms. The talented teams that build and maintain these resources are involved in a number of international projects. Two of these projects are the Open Targets Perturbation Catalog for providing harmonised and curated human gene, variant, and expression data to enable users to explore, combine, visualise, and access valuable perturbation data, and the PARADIGM project for integrating high-resolution datasets into existing tools and databases for the genomic medicine community.

Mallory has a particular focus on promoting the responsible sharing and reuse of FAIR human data to enable cutting-edge research as well as clinical applications for human genomic data. Towards this vision, Mallory also co-leads the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health (GA4GH) Implementation Forum to facilitate human genomic standards implementation, ensure interoperability, and promote data sharing best practices within scientific, clinical, and industry domains.

Previously at EMBL-EBI, Mallory was Project Lead then Coordinator for the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA), a controlled access resource for managing sensitive human omics data and jointly run by EMBL-EBI and the Centre for Genomic Regulation. Mallory joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as a metadata specialist for the Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Data Coordination Platform team. Prior to joining EMBL-EBI, Mallory completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins Unviersity where she was also a trainer for the Galaxy platform. Mallory holds a BSc in Bioinformatics from Saint Vincent College and a PhD in Bioinformatics at the University of Michigan.