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 increasing the diversity in endometriosis research, with a particular interest in populations of African ancestry. My work includes investigating the South African endometriosis patient experience, conducting admixture-aware and multi-ancestry genetic analyses, and establishing a multi-country endometriosis study in Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa in which we will be collecting data and samples. I am hoping that combining this new African-ancestry genetic data with existing diverse datasets will improve our understanding of the genetic architecture of endometriosis. My project is supervised by Professor Krina Zondervan, Dr Nilufer Rahmioglu, and Professor Christian Becker, as well as Professor Rizwana Roomaney from Stellenbosch University, South Africa. 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