Miss Rowan Connell BSc, MRes

Personal Statement

I studied my BSc in Zoology and Genetics and my MRes in Evolutionary and Ecological Biology at the University of Liverpool. Through the course of my research projects I worked with parasitic wasps, Drosophila and symbiotic bacteria, and DNA analysis techniques including qPCR and Sanger sequencing. I as an assistant technician in Greg Hurst's lab group and became interested in pursuing a career as a research technician. I worked as a locum technician performing short term contracts for the University of Liverpool and UCL before becoming the research technician in 2017 on a BBSRC project supervised by Andrea Betancourt. I curated over 500 fruit fly lines, performed breeding crosses and extracted and processed their DNA for analysis.

I now work as a research assistant for the Centre for Genomic Research, sequencing DNA and RNA for hundreds of research projects worldwide.