This month we’re shining the spotlight on Loan Somarriba, one of our Bioinformatics Team Leaders. Loan joined Fios as a bioinformatician back in 2015, and moved into his Bioinformatics Team leader role in July 2020. However, as you’ll read below – he’s more than happy to put his bioinformatician hat back on every once in a while!

Loan with his daughter, Aliénor

My Journey To Fios

I started as a lab scientist with a degree in applied biology (DUT) from Université de Clermont-Ferrand in France and a bachelor with Honours in cellular and molecular biology from Herriot Watt University in Edinburgh. I then turned to bioinformatics by completing the Quantitative Genetics and Genome Analysis master’s degree at the University of Edinburgh. Once I graduated, I joined Fios as a bioinformatician.

My role

I am now a Bioinformatics Team Leader at Fios which involves managing a team of Bioinformaticians. My day-to-day duties involve making sure that my team can progress smoothly through their workload by providing them with scientific and technical guidance as well as having a final review of projects before we send out the final reports to our clients. I also frequently collaborate with the business development team to help discuss projects with clients and scope out analyses. When time permits, I also contribute to some internal R&D.

What’s the most challenging aspect of your role?

Right now, the most challenging aspect of my job is not being a bioinformatician. I really miss getting my teeth stuck into a difficult dataset or a coding problem and spending hours staring at a screen without noticing the day go by.

What do you enjoy most about working at Fios?

The incredible diversity of tasks and projects we get to work on. Being a small company, we don’t compartmentalise our teams and lock ourselves in a few very specific areas of research, instead we have a pool of talented Bioinformaticians with very different backgrounds, experiences and specialties. That means that even though you might not be the {insert your favourite omics} expert, you can still get involved in a project and work together with the expert, sucking up every bit of their knowledge. So maybe it’s more the constant challenges and learning aspect of the work that I enjoy…. that and the Christmas parties.

What was your favourite hobby during lockdown?

I got back into baking bread and making kimchee. It’s much easier to look after yeast cultures and fermenting food when you’re working from home.

See also:

Yun-Yu Chen joins team Fios!

What is Bioinformatics – Overview and Examples

Fios Genomics’ Gene Expression Data Analysis Service