Biography
I am a postdoctoral research scientist in the Garrido-Oter group, working on a project within the Decoding Biodiversity programme at the Earlham Institute.
The project aims to revolutionise the identification and study of environmental microbes utilising the intrinsic fluorescent properties of microorganisms and combining this with a machine learning approach.
The end goal is to develop a reliable and accurate system for characterising community composition without relying on the existing labour-intensive approaches and ultimately to allow for large culture collections targeting taxonomic groups recalcitrant to existing culturing methods.
Before starting this position at the Earlham Institute I completed a PhD in Molecular Biology at the University of East Anglia (UEA) earlier in 2024, investigating the link between antibiotic production and compartmentalisation by cell division in Streptomyces Coelicolor.
This work focused on identifying and characterising a previously undiscovered self-regulatory function of Streptomyces Coelicolor antibiotics, highlighting that the production of antibiotics by soil-dwelling bacteria is not simply to provide a competitive advantage over neighbouring species.
In 2020 I completed an integrated masters in Biochemistry at UEA with my final year research project based at EI as part of the Macaulay group.
In this project I worked on the development of a method to allow for sequencing of the variable region of T-cell receptor which would work for both polyclonal and monoclonal samples at both the multi-cell and single-cell level.