Dr. Sam Haynes was the first PhD student in the lab, and defended his PhD in January 2023. Hurrah!!! Sam moved on to work as an applications consultant at the Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF), part of EPCC.

Sam worked on quantification of RNA-sequencing and other transcriptomics data. Sam is jointly supervised by Guido Sanguinetti, and funded by the BBSRC’s EASTBIO Doctoral Training Program. He mentored several students during his PhD including; Abhishek Jain, Xuejia Ke, Hanqin Du, and Chong Jing Qi. Sam also has experience as a TA both in the Informatics Department’s Machine Learning and Pattern Recognition course and the Maths Department’s Statistics with Data Science Msc projects.

He is a strong advocate for Open Science, orignally partaking in the eLife Open Innovation Leaders programme as a mentee before joining the Open Life Science programme as a mentor. Together with Edward, Sam has helped develop an open source R package for the analysis of qPCR data called tidyqpcr. He wrote a blog post for eLife explaining tidyqpcr.

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sam undertook a 3 month internship at the University of Edinburgh’s Epidemiology group, Epigroup. He contributed to the surveillance and reporting of the spread of COVID-19 across Scotland and the WHO Africa Region. This work primarily consisted of collating the latest COVID-19 WHO datasets and producing a country by country summary report which was published weekly by the TIBA partnership.

In a previous life, Sam studied Physics at the University of Manchester completing a MPhys in 2017. He confirmed the existence of two early stage protostars, cheerily named SDC 18.888-0.476 A and B, for his Masters project. This project built upon previous work conducted during an internship at the Taiwanese research institute ASIAA in the summer of 2016. At ASIAA, Sam planned and executed an observation of an Infrared Dark Cloud using the Submillimeter Array (a radio telescope in Hawaii) providing the data he analysed during his Masters.

Outside of his PhD studies, Sam could be found developing, recording and editing episodes for the School of Biological Science’s podcast, BioPod. Or, writing articles for the University’s student newspaper, The Student. He is very interested in learning about the history of science, promoting queer scientists and understanding the philosophy of knowledge.