Georgia Whitton is a Senior Bioinformatician in the Core Bioinformatics and Biostatistics platform at the Francis Crick Institute, where she supports over 100 biomedical research groups through project work, training and consultancy.
She’s also chaired the groups standards platform and co-led the institutes most successful edition of its annual Crick Data Challenge.
Georgia studied Molecular Biology and Genetics at UEA, just round the corner from here, before her honours placement and summer internship here at the Earlham Institute in the Haerty Lab.
Her career has since taken her through the Wellcome Sanger Institute, working in Genomic Surveillance, and to the Crick, first working in oncology research before joining the core bioinformatics team.
She’s been teaching data science along the way to career-changers with Code First Girls and through various public engagement work. Today, she's here to share what she's learned about building a career on breadth as much as depth.
Abstract: A PhD (or a first job in genomics for that matter) teaches you to go deep, and that depth matters, but careers rarely stay narrow for long.
In this talk, Georgia traces her own path from that first transcriptomics internship to a career now built as much on coordination, teaching, and communication as on code, and shares what she's learned about building breadth deliberately on top of expertise, rather than letting it happen by accident. How lateral moves opened doors that staying narrow never would have, how teaching forced her to translate hard-won knowledge for people outside her field, and how to tell which parts of your skillset are worth deepening versus broadening as your career evolves.
Georgia hopes to leave you with a practical toolkit for thinking about transferable skills, how to spot the ones you already have, and how to keep building a career that carries them with you, whatever direction it takes.
