====== James Perkins ======

{{ :cathteam:n222401805_3482379_2597.jpg|Me}}

===== London Pain Consortium PhD Student =====

I am a member of the London Pain Consortium, an initiative formed in 2002 by a grant from the Wellcome Trust. I am currently moving into the first year proper of my PhD, supervised by Christine and based in the CATH lab, having completed a year of 3 rotations, working on projects with different labs.

===== Academic Background =====

I took my undergraduate degree in biology at Leeds, with an erasmus year at UAM in Madrid, followed by a year long MSc in Imperial. After this I worked in Computer Science for a year before starting my PhD program.

In my masters degree in bioinformatics I helped in the development of a web based server aimed at prediction of miRNA binding sites in Arabidopsis at Malaga University, and produced a web based application for pathway database searching using OpenLaszlo software.

===== Current Research Interests =====


In my 3 rotations I have been dealing with expression data from microarray experiments from the pain group, normally of pain models. I have produced a database for expression profiles, which implements some analysis attempting to find novel genes involved in pain. I am also interested in gene set enrichment in microarray experiments, and am using these to try to find more information about pathways involved in pain.

For future work I intend to combine more publically available datasets with the current data in the LPC, and compare this with proteomics data to try and find the correlation between expression and protein level. I also intend to use comparative genomic techniques to help elucidate the evolution of signalling pathways involved in pain, and identify novel targets for pain management

===== Other Interests =====
I am a keen drummer and guitar player, and I attend the Bloomsbury gym regularly, which I find is a great way of dealing with programming related stress.

===== Other CATH Team Members =====

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