Personal Statement
I am a UoL research fellow (https://news.liverpool.ac.uk/2024/11/01/first-cohort-of-university-of-liverpool-research-fellows-announced/) focussing on biofilm development in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Prior to starting my own research group, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate (2019-2024) in the microbial physics group at the University of Sheffield. Before that, I received my PhD (2019) from the University of Oxford, where I studied bacterial motility in developing biofilms.

Work in my group is currently funded by a Wellcome early career award (https://wellcome.org/research-funding/funding-portfolio/funded-grants/crawling-dark-how-pseudomonas-aeruginosa-navigates ).

Research Overview
We use a range of microfluidic devices to expose surface-attached bacteria to precisely defined chemical and physical stimuli. We use high-resolution microscopy to image bacteria as they respond to these stimuli, often following their responses over relatively long time periods (>24 h). We then use massively parallel cell tracking to follow and analyse bacterial behaviour, transforming our movies into a statistical description of the behaviour of thousands of individual bacterial cells.

We typically use the opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa as our model organism. P. aeruginosa is a prolific biofilm producer that often exhibits a striking degree of antibiotic resistance and is listed by the World Health Organisation as a priority pathogen. P. aeruginosa crawls across surfaces using twitching motility, which is driven by the extension and retraction of molecular grappling hooks called type-IV-pili. We are interested in how cells use twitching motility to respond to antibiotics, competing microbes and the host immune system during biofilm formation and infection.