Group Leader, EPSRC Open Fellow and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Synthetic Biology at Imperial College London

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Biography

I am a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Synthetic Biology in the Section for Structural and Synthetic Biology in the Department of Infectious Disease at Imperial College London. I am also a Visiting Academic at the University of Oxford.

I completed MSci in Chemistry at the University of Bristol (2005-2009) of which I worked one year in Industry at DuPont (USA) working on 2nd generation biofuels. I then pursued a PhD at the University of Bristol (2009-2014) with Professor Stephen Mann where I designed and built artificial cells for understanding the role of the eukaryotic cytoskeleton. I then moved for to the University of Oxford for a one-year postdoctoral position (2014-2015) working on lipid bilayer biophysics and TIRF microscopy with Professor Mark Wallace (now at King’s College London).

In 2016 I became fascinated with microbial communities and sought to train in microbiology and microbial ecology. To do this I worked as a postdoctoral researcher with Professor Hagan Bayley and Professor Kevin Foster at the University of Oxford developing 3D printing methods to 1) construct micron-sized patterned compartments to control cellular behaviour and 2) generate patterned bacterial communities to understand structure/function relationships.

I took parental leave for 6 months between 2021-2022, and joined Imperial College London in November 2023 to start a research group in 3D printing microbiome communities. Previously I was a Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London between 2022-2023.