Kirsty McCaffrey Trainee Bioinformatician

Meet Kirsty!

Kirsty McCaffrey discusses her typical day as a trainee bioinformatician and touches on the challenges and opportunities for the profession. For example, to be compliant with current guidelines, Kirsty discusses having to store the raw sequence data from each patient which can be up to 200 GB in size for a single patient. To give you an idea the average hard drive of a laptop can store between 100-300GB, so you can see how data storage of genomic data can quickly become a problem in healthcare.

Over to you

You’ll see that Kirsty also highlights communication as a key part of her role, it’s important that all healthcare professionals develop this skill to communicate with their colleagues and patients when required.

Given clinical bioinformaticians are not patient facing can you suggest ways that a trainee might develop this skill?