Dr. Ali Awan is the Lead Scientist for the Genomics Innovation Unit (GIU) at Guy's and St. Thomas' NHS Trust. The GIU develops new genomic diagnostic tests for cancer and rare disease. Initial work from the GIU has focussed on applying long read sequencing towards genomic stratification in Acute Myeloid Leukaemia and characterisation of triplet repeat expansions in Huntington's Disease.

Ali obtained his BSc. in Biological Sciences and MSc. in Computational Biology at Stanford University, and his PhD in Molecular Biology at Cornell University. His postdoctoral work in synthetic biology took him to Imperial College, and this was followed by a short stint in the video games industry as a data scientist, before coming back to working on biology at the NHS.