Josie Everatt

I joined the Nuffield Department of Women's & Reproductive Health in October 2023 to start my DPhil with the EndoCaRe group. My project focuses on characterising the genetics of endometriosis in diverse populations with a particular interest in populations of African ancestry. The largest endometriosis genome-wide association study to date identified 42 associated loci in European-ancestry populations. I hope to investigate which variants are associated with endometriosis in diverse populations (if they are the same as these 42 loci or unique), and to combine data from multiple ancestries to improve downstream analyses, with the aim of providing stronger evidence for potentially causal variants and their possible functions. My project is supervised by Dr Nilufer Rahmioglu, Professor Christian Becker, and Professor Krina Zondervan, and my DPhil is funded by a Clarendon Scholarship.

Prior to attending Oxford, I worked as a bioinformatics scientist at the Centre for Respiratory Diseases and Meningitis at South Africa's National Institute for Communicable Disease, where I was involved in genomic surveillance of respiratory viruses including SARS-CoV-2, RSV, and influenza. I am looking forward to now getting the chance to combine two of my long-standing interests: women's health and African genomics.

Education

• MSc in Bioinformatics, University of Edinburgh
• BSc (Hons) in Genetics, University of the Witwatersrand
• BSc in Biological Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand