About Me

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Assistant Professor
dashnowlab.org
Department of Biomedical Informatics University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

Software

STRling: Detecting novel (and reference) STR expansions from short-read sequencing data
TRGT: Genotyping tandem repeats from PacBio HiFi data
STRetch: Detecting STR expansions from short-read sequencing data
SRST2: Short Read Sequence Typing for Bacterial Pathogens
Cpipe: a shared variant detection pipeline designed for diagnostic settings

Research Interests

Bioinformatics, Genomics, Next-generation sequencing, Variant calling, Human medical genomics, Short Tandem Repeats (STRs).

Biography

Harriet Dashnow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. Harriet did her postdoc in the Quinlan Lab at the University of Utah. She did her PhD research in the Oshlack Lab at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute (MCRI) and the University of Melbourne. She is best known for her work in detecting STR expansions, but has also published bioinformatic methods for clinical exome sequencing and microbial gene detection. She has previously worked as a bioinformatician at the University of Melbourne and Melbourne Bioinformatics, where she worked on the Melbourne Genomics Health Alliance project. You can learn more about her lab and research here: dashnowlab.org.

Harriet obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Psychology), a Bachelor of Science (Genetics, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology) and a Master of Science (Bioinformatics) with Dean’s Honours from the University of Melbourne. She was awarded an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship, a Murdoch Children’s Research Institute Top Up Scholarship and a Australian Genomics Health Alliance PhD Award for her PhD studies.

Harriet is committed to supporting the bioinformatics community. She has served as Vice President and then President of COMBINE (the International Society for Computational Biology Regional Student Group for Australia) and has served as the student representative on the Australian Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society executive committee.

She has substantial experience in teaching bioinformatics and genetics at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She organises and teaches computational skills workshops in such areas as genomics, Software and Data Carpentry, Python, R, Unix and Git version control. She co-authored the O’Reilly programming book Elegant SciPy.

Education

Bachelor of Science (Genetics, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology), The University of Melbourne
Bachelor of Arts (Psychology), The University of Melbourne
Master of Science (Bioinformatics), The University of Melbourne
PhD (Bioinformatics), The University of Melbourne

Interviews and profiles

Selected publications