Dr. Javier Santoyo received his degree in Pharmacy from the University of Salamanca, Spain, and obtained his Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University Autonoma of Madrid working on protein synthesis regulation. After a post-doctoral stay at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry (Göttingen, Germany) he enrolled in the Bioinformatics post-graduate program at the University of Abertay Dundee and worked at the Wellcome Trust Biocentre of Dundee University to gain his MSc in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

As a bioinformatician, he worked in leading projects like the annotation of the first draft of the human genome at the Sanger Institute, the implementation of bioinformatics tool for the production of the Oncochip, a microarray for the study of cancer genes, at the Spanish National Cancer Centre (CNIO), and the development of Babelomics, a suit of bioinformatics tools for microarray and NGS functional data analysis, at the Prince Felipe Research Centre in Valencia, Spain. Afterwards, he was the Head of Bioinformatics and the Scientific Coordinator of the Genomics and Bioinformatics Platform of Andalusia (Seville, Spain), where he led the Medical Genome Project (MGP), a large genomics project that studied the genetic bases of rare diseases in the Spanish population using whole exome sequencing.

In 2014 Dr. Santoyo joined Edinburgh Genomics as Bioinformatics Operations Manager and in 2015 became the Facility Manager of Edinburgh Genomics Clinical Division (EGC), based at the Roslin Institute. EGC was an ISO 17025:2005 accredited high-throughput whole genome sequencing (WGS) laboratory that processed more than 15,000 genomes during its 5 years of operations. As EGC’s Facility Manager, he supervised and managed the sequencing of the 1,000 human genomes provided by the four NHS Scottish Clinical laboratories, for the Scottish Genomes Partnership (SGP) Rare Diseases program, as part of Genomics England’s 100,000 genomes project. Since 2020, he is the Manager of Edinburgh Genomics, based at the School of Biological Sciences.