I am an Associate Professor in the Modernising Medical Microbiology consortium in the Nuffield Department of Medicine.
My research group is currently focussed on developing methods able to predict whether individual protein mutations confer resistance to specific antibiotics (or not). More broadly I am involved in efforts within the John Radcliffe hospital to translate genetics into Clinical Microbiology, starting with tuberculosis. As you can see below, I have a very interdisciplinary background and my main research goal is to improve the diagnosis of bacterial infections to help clinicians in the coming years as the prevalence of antimicrobial resistance increases.
I read Nature Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge, specialising in Physics, before leaving academia and working at Capital One Bank for 3 years, ending up as a Senior Business Analyst. The lure of research was strong and I did my PhD in Chemistry at University College London before starting as a postdoc in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Oxford studying how membrane proteins, notably ion channels and transporters, function using classical molecular dynamics. Early on I was helped enormously by St John’s College where I was a Junior Research Fellow for four years. In 2016 I moved to the John Radcliffe hospital to study antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and got involved in the international tuberculosis project CRyPTIC. As part of that project I launched BashTheBug, a very successful Zooniverse citizen science project which allowed 46,427 volunteers to classify 4,746,420 images of M. tuberculosis growth. In 2021 I helped establish a spinout company, GPAS Ltd, which developed a cloud-based platform able to rapidly and securely process raw genetics files generated by sequencing a SARS-CoV-2 sample and we are currently expanding the number of pathogens that can be analysed.
