Dr Aaron Jeffries

About me:

Associate Professor and Director of the University of Exeter Sequencing Facility

Aaron Jeffries is an Associate Professor working in the Faculty of Health and Life Science and is the director of the University of Exeter Sequencing Facility. Aaron obtained an Honours degree in Genetics from Cardiff University and completed his PhD in King’s College London in 2004. Aaron’s PhD involved mapping and sequencing of t (6;11) translocation associated with schizophrenia like psychosis in a three generation pedigree, leading to the identification of a potential candidate gene explaining the psychosis and the winning publication for the Lilly Molecular Psychiatry award 2003. He also undertook the largest genotype/phenotype study of ring chromosome 22 to date.

Aaron joined a developmental neurobiology group at King’s College London in 2005 where he shifted focus from his initial work around signalling pathways to studying allele specific heterogeneity observed in clonal cells, known as Random Monoallelic Expression. Working with clonal stem cells, and later epigenetic reprogramming techniques, he has furthered this work using stem cells as model systems. Aaron joined the Complex Disease Epigenetics group in January 2014 to further his research in single cell heterogeneity and its relation to disease. Through this he has performed single cell research using a variety of platforms and further psychiatric genetic/transcriptomic and epigenetic research.

In April 2017, Aaron joined the Exeter Sequencing Facility and continues to develop long read sequencing technology for applications in neurodegenerative disease and epigenetics and in July 2019 became Head of Exeter Sequencing Facility, and later director (2024).

Among a variety of sequencing projects Aaron was involved in sequencing relating to the SARS-CoV-2 epidemic, first as a contributor to COG-UK and later through development and use of rapid SARS-CoV-2 genome sequencing from wastewater samples to track the dynamic nature of variants/lineages at a population level. Aaron has also worked directly on a number of transcriptomic, epigenomic and neuroscience based research projects, including publication first author publication of a reference long read based transcriptome of the human and mouse brain.

The Exeter Sequencing Facility now provides collaboration to a wide range of projects in various faculties and research areas including biosciences, epigenetics/neurodegeneration, aquaculture, geography and many others.

Qualifications:

Honours Degree in Genetics, Cardiff University

PhD King's College London 2004