Euan Ashley

Ashley was born in Scotland and attended the University of Glasgow where he graduated in Physiology and Medicine. He completed residency training in Medicine at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford and received his Doctorate (DPhil) from Christ Church College.

Ashley is best known for his work translating insight from the human genome to medicine. In 2009, he led the team that carried out the first medical interpretation of a human genome. The work was featured at the Unlocking Life's Code Exhibit of the Smithsonian museum and recognised at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy "Data to Knowledge to Action" event. In 2010, Ashley's team carried out the first whole genome molecular autopsy. In 2011, they extended their genome medical analysis to the first family sequenced using Illumina technology. In this work, they developed inheritance tools for family genome analysis, inferred recombination sites to the lowest median resolution achieved (below 1kb), and reported chromosome-length computational phasing for the first time. In 2014, Ashley became co-chair of the steering committee of the NIH Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN). Ashley is a recipient of the National Innovation Award from the American Heart Association (AHA) and a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's New Innovator Award.

Ashley is also co-Principal Investigator of the MyHeart Counts study, a launch partner for Apple Inc's ResearchKit platform in 2015. The first tranche of results from this study was published in 2017.

In 2022 Ashley and his research team developed an ultra-rapid nanopore genome sequencing test for critically ill patients. They demonstrated that this test can diagnose genetic disease in as little as 7 hours and 18 minutes. This has been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for the fastest DNA sequencing technique.