Dr Anna Frangou | Science Comms

I am the Research Strategy and Communications Lead at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and the Center for Systems Biology Dresden, working with Prof Heather Harrington, a Director of both institutes.

Our goal is to bring mathematics and molecular biology together, building new mathematical methods to solve biological problems. My role is to build and facilitate interactions and collaborations between scientists and mathematicians to this end via several channels. 

Previously I was a client-facing Associate Medical Director at Open Health Communications, where I built strategic communication plans and created scientific material for scientists, medics, patients, and the public to maximize the impact and accessibility of pharmaceuticals produced by big pharma and biotech via their external communications.  

I worked with several large clients, including (non-exhaustively) AbbVie, Astellas, AstraZeneca, BeiGene, Boehringer Ingelheim, Genmab, and Merck/MSD.

I am a scientist by training, and worked as a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at the Big Data Institute, Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, with a specialism in computational cancer genomics. I developed methodology that was taken into the core pipelines of the 100,000 Genomes Project at Genomics England, and worked pan cancer, with some stronger focus on colorectal, oesophageal, and testicular cancer. 

I am published in Nature, Nature Communications, Cancer Cell, and Bioinformatics, among others. A couple more papers are coming soon. 

My PhD (DPhil) is from the Wellcome Centre for Human Genetics, University of Oxford. 

I have also published a few times with Prof Robin Dunbar – of Dunbar number fame – and coauthored a feature article in the UNESCO publication ‘A World of Science’.