Biography

• I earnt my BSc and Msc degrees from the University of Sussex, studying Molecular Genetics.
• I did my undergraduate research project with Neil Crickmore, engineering quorum quenching into Bacillus thuringiensis spores, and my master’s project with Alison Sinclair, investigating the DNA binding sites of the EBV protein Zta both in silico and at the bench.
• Having had my interest in host:pathogen interactions sparked in the Sinclair lab, I decided to pursue a PhD in immunology. I took a research assistant position at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine in Oxford, where I learned T cell assays on the FluWatch team, while applying for grad school.
• I undertook my PhD in the Department of Infection & Immunity at University College London, supervised by Benny Chain. Here I found the perfect combination of all of my major research interests - molecular biology, bioinformatics, and T cell immunology - in an exciting new project at the dawn of a new field: T cell receptor repertoire sequencing. I developed and contributed to novel pipelines for the wet lab amplification and dry lab analysis of TCR sequences, and applied this to investigate the impact of chronic HIV infection and subsequent anti-retroviral therapy upon the T cell compartment.
• After my PhD I moved to Boston to begin my post-doctoral work with Mark Cobbold in the Center for Cancer Research at Massachusetts General Hospital. Here I worked on cancer-specific immunopeptidomes - particularly phosphopeptide antigens - and finding T cell responses against them.
• When Mark left academia for industry I transitioned within the department to join the lab of Aaron Hata, with whom we had recently begun collaborating. Here I’ve been building pipelines for the discovery of anti-lung cancer TCRs, particularly anti-ALK fusion positive lung cancer.