Jo Mattocks is a PhD student in the Ewing group at the MRC Human Genetics Unit (HGU) in the University of Edinburgh’s Institute of Genetics and Cancer.

Jo has a BSc (Hons) Medical Genetics degree (First Class) from the University of Huddersfield, for which she won the Chancellor’s Prize for Outstanding Performance by an undergraduate student. She was also awarded the University of Huddersfield’s Don Nicholson prize, for highest average marks in a biological sciences degree, and the Royal Society of Biology’s Top Student award 2021.

Jo’s PhD project will look at how spatiotemporal evolutionary trajectories of mutation in high grade serous ovarian cancer can be used for patient stratification according to treatment response and prognosis. The project will include: finding the temporal ordering of key driver events in HGSOC, determining when key mutational processes are active in HGSOC and looking at how intra-tumour heterogeneity (ITH) can affect treatment response. Both supervised and unsupervised learning methods will be used to identify patient subgroups with differing treatment response and survival. Her primary supervisor for this project is Dr Ailith Ewing, and her secondary supervisor is Professor Martin Taylor, also of the MRC HGU.

Jo is passionate about encouraging women to pursue careers in STEM and credits Dr Amy Farrah-Fowler and Dr Bernadette Rostenkowski-Wolowitz of the Big Bang Theory for inspiring her to pursue her own career in science, due to a lack of female STEM role models when she was younger (see her latest blog post). She is encouraged by the large proportion of female scientists both in the MRC HGU and the wider scientific community and is heartened that future generations of female scientists will not have to look to fictional worlds to find inspiring STEM role models.