Staff Profile

After obtaining a degree in physics, I worked in the manufacturing industry for several years where I was responsible for the worldwide delivery of high-value scientific installation projects. My industrial experience has made me extremely pragmatic, and results focused. I have a PhD in biochemical spectroscopy and using High Power Computing (HPC) to perform computational chemistry. I continued in biochemistry with a half-time postdoctoral position in New York before moving to Peru, teaching myself bioinformatics and reorientating my research to genomics, setting up a bioinformatics capability in an established genetics research laboratory, which I applied to the investigation of glaucoma and human populations.

I returned to the UK in 2016 to take up a post-doctoral research position based jointly at the Earlham Institute and Quadram Institute Bioscience in Norwich, working on pathogen evolution which has reset my career trajectory. I joined the University of Leeds as a lecturer in bacterial genomics in July 2022.

My work concerns the evolution of pathogenicity and its impact on the epidemiology of bacterial pathogens and also method development of tools to detect horizontal gene transfer in bacteria.

I am also developing the application of single-cell whole genome sequencing to in-vitro evolution studies focussing on the evolution of antimicrobial resistance.