Heather McMurray

I joined DIL as part of the Sample Processing Team in May 2017. Our responsibilities are to log, process and store blood and tissue samples from clinical trials, together with processing samples from both T1D and healthy volunteers. We have also been heavily involved in the generation of DNA for exome and whole genome sequencing.

I hold a BSc in Cell Biology from the University of Glasgow and a PhD from the Department of Pathology, Cambridge, investigating, “The Role of the Macrophage in Atherogenesis”. This was followed by a period developing cell-based assays in the cardiovascular group at Pfizer and a postdoc at University of California, San Diego, investigating the role of oxidised lipoproteins in cell migration. Since then, I have joined a start-up Biotech company using human tissue for drug development and worked for 10 years at GSK, in assay development. I spent the next 5 years working at the Cambridge Blood & Stem Cell Biobank before family commitments found me relocating to Oxford.