Biography
I am a NRPDTP PhD student working in the Hall group under the supervision of Neil Hall, Mark McMullan, and Simon Griffiths (JIC).
My PhD project focuses on identifying optimal root microbial communities that can supress wheat take-all disease (caused by the fungus Gaeumannomyces tritici) across different wheat cultivars. To achieve this, I will be investigating the complex interactions between the plants, the rhizosphere microbes, and the underlying genetics of the wheat by comparing diverse ancestral Watkins landraces with modern elite varieties.
Prior to EI, I completed my Bachelor of Science in Biotechnology and Microbiology at the University of York in 2026. During my degree I completed a year in industry at Syngenta with their Wheat Trialling team in Cambridgeshire. There, I managed a trial at a single project site which evaluated the agronomic performance, as well as the impact of a biological seed treatment containing nitrogen-fixing bacteria on 42 diverse wheat varieties, which included some lines derived from the Watkins collection.
My academic research has included performing RNA-Seq analysis on wheat transcriptomic data to investigate the AKT1 gene, alongside computationally modeling bacterial proteins using AlphaFold3 and PyMOL, validating these results in vitro through extrapolating equilibrium dissociation constants as well as Hill coefficients from Electrophoretic Mobility Shift Assays (EMSAs).
