Research.

I completed my DPhil at the University of Oxford, where I studied antibiotic persistence in bacteria.

Persisters are fascinating: they can survive antibiotics despite being genetically susceptible, making them a prominent driver of recurrent and hard-to-treat infections. Their rarity within microbial populations and lack of any distinct genetic signature makes them exceedingly elusive to study.

To tackle this, I focused my research on high-throughput growth curve experiments to understand how changing population dynamics affected persistence. I found that persister percentages were influenced by population division history.

Before the DPhil, my Master's research took me somewhere quite different. I studied ticks and tick-borne pathogens, investigating the prevalence of Babesia and Borrelia in cats across Great Britain.

Parasitology isn't everyone's first pick, but the unusual nature of these systems is precisely what makes them so interesting. That work ended up taking me somewhere unexpected, feeding into research helping to identify disease candidates for immune-mediated inflammatory diseases as part of business development work in the US.

It's the breadth of adaptation of organisms that drew me into biology in the first place. I'm deeply curious, and the more unusual or extreme the system, the more I want to understand it. Biology is one of the most creative sciences out there, and it's always the stranger, more overlooked corners of it that keep me coming back for more.