Dr Margaret Lam (PhD)

Dr Jane Hawkey (PhD)

Jane joined the lab in 2013 as a PhD student, with a focus on the mobile elements that are responsible for disseminating antimicrobial resistance. During her PhD she developed the software ISMapper for enabling the detection of insertion sequences from short-read sequencing data. After the completion of her PhD in 2017, Jane became a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the group. She is interested in the genomic evolution of hospital pathogens, particularly regarding mobile genetic elements that are shared between species. Find Jane on Google Scholar.

Dr Zoe Dyson (PhD)

Zoe is a Marie Curie research fellow based at LSHTM in London, focussing on genomic surveillance of the bacteria that cause typhoid fever (Salmonella Typhi). She uses genomic sequence analyses to understand how these bacteria spread within and between geographies and how they evolve drug resistance. Find Zoe on Google Scholar.

Dr Leonardos Mageiros (PhD)

Leonardos joined the lab in 2020 and is working on gut metagenomics of typhoid fever, in collaboration with the Strategic Alliance for Typhoid in Asia and Africa (STRATAA) project. Find Leonardos on Google Scholar.

Dr Louise Teixeira Cerdeira (PhD)

Louise joined the lab in 2020 to work on developing mini-GPU-based tools for portable nanopore sequencing, and to help with development of interactive tools for genomic surveillance of typhoid, Klebsiella & Shigella . Find Louise on Google Scholar.

Lab Manager

Dr Louise Judd (PhD)

Louise manages the group’s wet lab space and equipment, and performs the majority of our wet lab experiments. These include DNA or RNA extractions and sequencing, and bacterial phenotyping e.g. antibiotic susceptibility testing. Louise developed the lab’s protocol for multiplexed long read sequencing on the Oxford Nanopore platform, which has become an integral component of many of our projects. Find Louise on Google Scholar.

Research assistant

Taylor Harshegyi

Taylor holds a MSc in Biomedical Science and joined the lab in 2019 to assist with wet lab experiments and sequencing projects.

Stephen Watts

Stephen is a PhD student investigating respiratory pathogens. He uses a combination of 16S RNA sequence and whole genome sequence data to explore the ecology and evolution of bacteria that colonise or cause disease in the respiratory tract. As part of this work Stephen developed FastSpar and HiCap.

Ryan Wick

Ryan Wick is a PhD student and research assistant. He developed Bandage & Unicycler. His work mainly focuses on bacterial genome assembly with an emphasis on the use of data from Oxford Nanopore’s sequencing platforms. His broader academic interests include machine learning, metagenomics and phylogenomics. Find Ryan on Google Scholar.

Hassan Al-Mana

Hassan is a PhD student who is using genomic approaches to understand the genetic basis for uropathogenicity of Klebsiella pneumoniae (i.e. how the bacterium causes urinary tract infections).

David Edwards

David joined the lab in 2010 as a Masters project student, wherein he developed RedDog for bacterial nucleotide variant and gene content analysis, and helped to write the Beginner’s Guide to Comparative Bacterial Genomics. David stayed on in the lab as a research assistant for several years before enrolling as a PhD student, investigating approaches for detecting different types of natural selection in pathogen populations, and developing SNPPar. David tragically passed away October 2020. He was a wonderful and generous colleague who will be sorely missed by the other members of the lab.