Mario is a Reader in Computational Medicine at King’s College London, and Head of Bioinformatics for the School of Life Course & Population Sciences. His interests lie in the development and application of statistical and computational genomics methods to disentangle the network of susceptibility factors – and their interactions – that lead to complex disease in humans, with a particular focus on metabolism, skin cancer, and renal diseases.
Recently his team has been focusing on leveraging next generation sequencing technologies to assess the influence of rare and structural variants on complex traits, and on characterisation of the microbiome using metagenomics data to investigate the interplay between the gut microbiota and host metabolism.
Chris started to work with TwinsUK in 1997 so has been a twin researcher for over 20 years! His research focuses on common eye diseases such as glaucoma, myopia, dry eye disease and age-related cataract.
Chris has been the Frost Professor of Ophthalmology at King’s College London and a Consultant Ophthalmologist (specialising in paediatric ophthalmology and squint surgery) at St Thomas’ Hospital since 2011.
He has led international studies finding genes that are involved in eye diseases, and is one of the leading scientists in this field, with ground-breaking research showing that many of these age-related diseases have an important genetic basis.
Cristina is a lecturer at King’s College London and head of the metabolomics research group at the DTR. Her research focuses on identifying novel molecular and dietary markers associated with age and age-related diseases, particularly cardiometabolic disorders using metabolomics in conjunction with several other “omics” datasets. More recently, she has been actively involved in COVID-19 research using data from the ZOE COVID Study App.
Cristina received a Master in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and a PhD in statistics from the University of Milan-Bicocca where she specialised in statistical genetics. She joined the Department of Twin Research and Genetic Epidemiology in 2011.
Dr Pirro Hysi is a Reader in Ophthalmology.
Darioush oversees data management and research administration at TwinsUK. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and Microelectronics from Queen Mary College University of London and an MSc in Microelectronics Systems Design from Brunel University.
Darioush joined TwinsUK in 2012 as Head of the Data & IT team and has since taken over as head of the Research Administration team as well. He is responsible for volunteer recruitment to studies, all IT related matters, data collection and integrity, privacy and GDPR and data provision to researchers. Darioush also sits on TREC to advise on all IT & data matters.
Victoria Vazquez is the TwinsUK Data Access and Collaborations Manager ensuring smooth access to data from the scientific community. Victoria has also worked as professor Tim Spector’s Executive Assistant for fifteen years, managing his busy schedule, organising events and liaising with the media.
