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Tuesday 2 October 2018 10:20am

Steph McGimpsey stands outside the Otago Biochemistry Department, explaining her research.

Otago Biochemistry's Stephanie McGimpsey is heading to Cambridge University thanks to the Woolf Fisher Trust.

After completing degrees in biological sciences at the University of Canterbury, Stephanie is now studying for a Master of Science degree at Otago under the supervision of Paul Gardner in the Department of Biochemistry.

Her area of expertise is bioinformatics, an interdisciplinary field of science that develops and uses software tools to understand biological data. She uses a combination of biology, computer science, mathematics and statistics to carry out her research.

For her master's degree, Stephanie has been analysing how well methods of sequence alignment work (lining up the sequences of two genes) when you want to figure out how similar two genes are.

At Cambridge University she will carry out a PhD in bioinformatics at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, and is hoping to pursue her interests in researching pathogens, noncoding RNA molecules, and variants of genes that cause diseases.

The scholarship, provided by the Woolf Fisher Trust, is given to young New Zealanders based on their outstanding academic ability, leadership potential and their integrity, vision and capacity for work. Sir Woolf Fisher (1912-75), co-founder of Fisher and Paykel, set up his trust in 1960 to recognise and reward excellence in education.

Steph McGimpsey shows some of her master's research on her computer.

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