Profile

I live in the countryside in Norfolk with my husband and work at the Earlham Institute in Norwich. I moved here in 2020 after spending 10 years living in New York City where I did my PhD and worked for a few years at the American Museum of Natural history.

I’ve studied protists (single celled microscopic eukaryotes) since first being introduced to them at university in Australia, where I got a Bachelor of Science in Botany. I’m also a passionate photographer and videographer, and spend a good deal of my time observing and documenting protists under the microscope. I produce photographs and videos of protists that get made into visual content for film and TV, social media, and print. You can see some of my visual work at my website: www.pondlifepondlife.com.

I like horses, and currently have two horses that I spend my time with in the weekends.

I started my research career when I was at the University of Melbourne. I joined a lab that studies a protist called Toxoplasma gondii, which is a parasite that infects many mammals, including us. In that lab I learned how to genetically modify these parasites to label particular proteins, shut off the function of particular genes, and observe the location of proteins inside the parasite’s cell using antibodies and microscopy. By using these techniques, we investigated the role of a protein in T. gondii, that protein is called the chloroquine resistance transporter, and when we started studying it we didn’t know what its role was in these parasites. We were able to discover that this protein formed part of a vesicle inside the cells that had not been observed before.

For my PhD research I studied a protist called Trichomonas vaginalis, which is a sexually transmitted parasite that infects humans. For my thesis, I used genomics technologies including RNA-Seq and small RNA-Seq to study the role of small RNA molecules in regulating gene expression in this parasite. We found that small RNAs may be involved in shutting down the expression of certain genes in T. vaginalis.

Since finishing my PhD I have worked on sequencing and assembling and studying the genomes of many different protist species. I don’t work on parasite species any more, instead, I work on protist that are free-living, which are found in water and soil and on surfaces all over the world. We want to learn more about the diversity of protist species that are out there, as many other studies have indicated that there are many thousands of protist species that exist, but have not yet been described or observed. We sequence the genomes of these free-living protists to try to learn more about them, and what their roles are in our ecosystems, and how they fit into the evolution of all species on Earth. For example, some a related to important parasites, and we hope we can learn more about the evolution of parasitism by studying protists that are related to parasite species.