Arjan Tolkamp

I'm currently responsible for the creation & maintenance of SQL databases to support research activities at the Charles River Edinburgh site using Provantis, a tool for managing clinical and preclinical workflows.

This role has a significant support aspect and I have greatly enjoyed developing soft skills in this role while interacting with laboratory staff, scientists and clients.

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• I was responsible for the collation of data from an EU funded research project. This was a UK-led international project to investigate the genetic role of resilience in different animal species with a focus on resilience to climate change.

• Parsed & Imported data from an international research consortium into a coherent SQL database

• Developed & maintained SQL algorithms for data imputation, parentage verification & other tasks

• Performed GWAS & genetic & genomic prediction for research projects in small ruminants using python and R

• Significant student contact, supporting PhD students + undergraduate students and staff members.

• Handled large volumes of genomic sequence data

• Extensive QA of genomic data

• Created software using SQL & Python for step-wise imputation of low density genotypes to whole genome sequence

• Genomic prediction using imputed sequence data

• Functional analysis and classification of genetic variants

• Presented at conferences including WCGALP 2014 and Edinburgh Genomics conference 2016.

Highlight: Developing and implementing SQL pipelines to handle & analyze genomic data- a first at Edinburgh University

• used FORTRAN to speed up existing data analyses

• Maintained SQL databases

• Cleaned data & performed exploratory analyses in SAS, python and SQL

• Our team developed a SaaS web service to allow cattle breeders to input data and receive output of analyses - I developed queries in our SQL backend

• Maintained support site, scoped work, logged tickets and completed tasks

• Significant customer support role with clients throughout the agriculture sector

Highlight: Writing VBA macros to predict disease from routinely collected animal data