Dr. Javier Santoyo Lopez
Head of Genomics Facility
Dr Javier Santoyo Lopez joined Edinburgh Genomics in 2014 as Bioinformatics Operations Manager and, in 2015, became Head of the Edinburgh Genomics Clinical Facility, a whole-genome sequencing centre based at the Roslin Institute. Since 2020, he has served as Head of Edinburgh Genomics.
He obtained his PhD in Molecular Biology from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain, and his MSc in Bioinformatics from the University of Abertay Dundee, UK. He has worked as a molecular biologist at renowned international centres, including the Severo Ochoa Centre for Molecular Biology (Madrid, Spain) and the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen, Germany), and as a computational biologist and bioinformatician at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre (University of Dundee) the Wellcome Sanger Institute and the Spanish National Cancer Centre. Prior to joining Edinburgh Genomics, he was Head of Bioinformatics at the Genomics and Bioinformatics Platform of Andalusia (Seville, Spain), and Scientific Coordinator of the Medical Genome Project (MGP), a population-scale whole-exome sequencing initiative focused on Spanish individuals affected by rare diseases.
Dr Santoyo-Lopez has been at the forefront of genomics technologies for the past twenty-five years. He participated in the annotation of the first draft of the human genome, the production of the Oncochip (the first microarray for cancer detection), and the development of Babelomics, a suite of tools for microarray and NGS functional data analysis. At Edinburgh Genomics, he established an ISO 17025-accredited whole-genome sequencing laboratory, oversaw the sequencing of 15,000 clinical-grade genomes, and led sequencing efforts for the Scottish Genomes Partnership, delivering 1,000 human genomes for rare disease research as part of Genomics England’s 100,000 Genomes Project. He has also developed and taught numerous advanced training courses focused on bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing data analysis, long-read sequencing, and genomics technologies.