Angela N. Brooks

Angela Brooks is an Assistant Professor of Biomolecular Engineering at University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a member of the Genomics Institute.

Early life and education After watching Gattaca in 1997, Brooks was inspired to study genetics. She studied biology at the University of California, San Diego, where she specialized in bioinformatics. She became interested in alternative splicing, and decided to focus on this for her doctoral studies. She moved to University of California, Berkeley for her graduate program, working with Steven E. Brenner. During her doctorate, she worked on Modencode, a project which looked to create an encyclopedia of the elements in the Drosophila melanogaster genomes. She created JuncBASE (junction-based analysis of splicing events), a program which analysed high-throughput sequencing data generated. Brooks was a postdoctoral fellow at the Dana–Farber Cancer Institute, where she worked with Matthew Meyerson. She co-lead the PanCancer Analysis of Whole Genomes (PCAWG) RNA working group and is the corresponding author on the PCAWG RNA paper. She also presented her PCAWG work at the AACR Annual Meeting in 2017 as part of a Major Symposia.

On March 2, 2020, she was appointed the Diversity Director for the UCSC Genomics Institute. and UCSC Research Mentoring Internship Program: An Initiative to Increase Diversity and Inclusion in Genomics Research.

Awards and honours Her awards and honours include;

2017 The Scientist One to Watch 2018 University of California, Santa Cruz Women in Science and Engineering Award 2018 Pew Scholar 2019 Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program Award 2020 NIH/NIGMS R35 Maximizing Investigators' Research Award