Research By-Fellow
I am an evolutionary biologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute (~20 minutes south of Cambridge). My research uses DNA sequencing technologies and computational approaches to understand the evolution of life on our planet. I work as part of the Darwin Tree of Life Project, an ambitious effort to sequence the genomes of all 70,000 species of animal, plant, and fungi in the British Isles over the next 10 years. I’m particularly passionate about nematodes (small, often microscopic, worms that are the most abundant animal on our planet) and how they’ve evolved to parasitise other organisms (including crop plants, livestock, and humans). By sequencing and analysing the genomes of hundreds of parasitic nematode species over the next few years, I aim to generate a detailed and comprehensive understanding of what, at the genetic level, makes for a successful parasite.
