PhD Molecular Virology (2011), University of Leeds, Astbury Centre for Structural & Molecular Biology
Recent publications [here]
My main interests lie in the application of proteomics to the study of virus replication and virus-host interactions, and mass spectrometry method development in support of these studies. In particular, this covers the use of single-cell proteomics to study heterogeneity at the protein level and the further development of single-cell/ultrasensitive proteomic methods.
My PhD with Prof. Julian Hiscox at the University of Leeds was my first introduction to mass spectrometry-based proteomics: I applied SILAC proteomics to study how virus infection transformed the cellular proteome. This began an interest in mass spectrometry and proteomics which has only increased with time. For my first postdoc, I worked with Prof. Ian Goodfellow, initially at Imperial College London, and then following when the lab moved to the University of Cambridge. Here I applied a range of methods including proteomics to study norovirus interactions with the host cell, becoming particularly fascinated with the way this virus uses a protease to generate all the viral proteins it needs to replicate by cleaving a single long ‘polyprotein’ into a range of active fully- or partially-cleaved intermediates. To really study this in-depth, I realised I needed to further my training in proteomics and so for my next postdoc I changed field to cell biology and moved to Northeastern University in the USA, where Dr Nikolai Slavov’s lab had just released a preprint detailing a first method for performing single-cell proteomics (SCoPE-MS). In my time in Nikolai’s lab I helped develop the second generation of this approach (SCoPE2), as well as developing an interest in how ribosome composition can change in response to cellular differentiation, and the functional consequences of these changes. In support of my single-cell proteomics work, I was awarded a Thermo Scientific Tandem Mass Tag Award (2018) as well as a Merck Exploratory Science Centre (MESC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2019).
I moved back to the UK in 2019 to take up a Tenure-Track Fellowship in the CPR at Liverpool where I both run my own research group and work with Claire and Rob to ensure the smooth running of the CPR.