Dr. Nathan Skene

Biography

Nathan Skene is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and group leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Imperial College London. His research focuses on using human genetics to gain insights into the neurobiology of brain disorders and cognitive traits. He employs a multidisciplinary approach that includes single-cell genomics, epigenomics, and machine learning. Notably, his lab has pioneered methods for the genetic identification of cell types underlying complex, rare diseases, integrating large datasets from Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) with single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq). Skene's group has developed various R packages, such as EWCE and MAGMA_Celltyping, facilitating comprehensive analyses. His research has revealed important aspects of Alzheimer's disease pathogenesis and highlights specific neural subsets in schizophrenia. As an advocate for reproducible research, he has created tools like Rworkflows and MungeSumstats to streamline research practices. Skene holds degrees from the University of Reading (BSc in Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics, 2008), the University of Cambridge (MPhil in Computational Biology, 2009), and completed his PhD at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. His post-doctoral work at Karolinska Institutet focused on developing large-scale single-cell RNA-seq atlases of brain cell types to investigate genetic disorders.

Research Interests

Awards