PhD Projects

Our students are studying diverse areas of mechanistic biology in the following BBSRC strategic themes:

Advancing the frontiers of bioscience discovery:

1) Understanding the rules of life (formerly World Class Underpinning Bioscience)

2) Transformative technologies (formerly Exploiting New Ways of Working)

Tackling strategic challenges:

3) Bioscience for sustainable agriculture and food (formerly Agriculture and Food Security)

4) Bioscience for renewable resources and clean growth (formerly Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy)

These are the new BBSRC priority areas, taken from strategic document, “Forward look for UK Bioscience”, available on the BBSRC website:

https://bbsrc.ukri.org/documents/forward-look-for-uk-bioscience-pdf/

NameProject title
Alina Capatina

Regulation of cellular metabolism and intercellular communication by sodium signalling
Owen Laing

Molecular mechanisms underlying replicative stress and genome damage in pluripotent stem cells (i-CASE)
Peter Daniels

Characterisation of the Rex1 ribonuclease in yeast and human cells
Federica Pastorelli

1/ Characterization of cyclic electron flow around photosystem I in photosynthesis 2/ Super-resolution video rate imaging of photosynthetic membrane dynamics in plants and algae
Megan Lovatt

SSA Cryo-electron Tomography of Activated Mammalian Synapses
Conor Scott

Mining the secretome of the lignocellulose degrading fungus Parascedosporium putredinis NO1 (i-CASE)
Larra Trinidad

Epithelial morphogenesis: coordinating planar polarity and tissue mechanics
Joseph Nabarro

Probing the dynamics, orientation and conformation of lipopolysaccharide in bacterial membranes through bio-orthogonal chemistry and single-molecule biophysics
Jessica Davis

Structural characterization of the enterococcal polysaccharide antigen and analysis of its contribution to cell growth, division and antibiotic resistance
Cara Wheeldon

The role of root exudates in density-dependent growth responses in plants
Quentin Levicky 2019 starter headshotQuentin Levicky

Development of Debaryomyces hansenii as a robust host for production of high value fatty acid-based biochemicals.
Katie Gelder

Investigating the role of phase separation in enhancer-dependent gene regulation
Kyle Le Huray

Investigation into the determinants of protein-lipid interactions using molecular dynamics simulations, machine learning and mass spectrometry
Alexandra Holmes

Investigating the Structure and Function of Membrane-Integral Pyrophosphatases
Robert Brench

Speeding towards efficient stomata - the molecular mechanisms that underpin increased stomatal efficiency
Hannah Jones

Seasonality control of barley flowering: from the lab to the field (i-CASE)
Kathryn Billane

The evolution of multidrug resistant bacterial pathogens
Jessica Edge

MicroRNA evolution in placental mammals: Unravelling conservation and divergence in their regulatory mechanisms in early pregnancy in different placental mammals
Kane Yoon

Epigenetics, embryogenesis and plasticity in insects
Thomas Hamer

Molecular localisation of Staphylococus aureus surface proteins
Harry Schofield

Structural and mechanistic insights into antibiotic resistance in Staphylococcus aureus
Jessica Mcneill

Plasticity of clathrin-mediated endocytosis in development
Rosalind Latham

Nuclease-resistant DNA nanostructures for high precision plant genome engineering
Joanna Greenman

SSA Mechanisms and functional consequences of platelet-macrophage cross-talk in type 2 immunity
Emily Byrd

Probing the Conformational Dynamics of α-Synuclein by Structural Mass Spectrometry
Charlotte Stevenson

Programming the subcellular localization of enzyme inhibitors
James Barrett

Super resolution imaging of the algal pyrenoid
Claire Smithson

Epigenetic mechanisms underlying responses to environmental stress
Liam Barratt

Future-proofing Our Food: Increasing Tolerance to Abiotic Stress in Hexaploid Bread Wheat Using Associative Transcriptomics
Megan Clarke

Primed for parasitism: pathogenic nematodes tailor their response to host plant exudates
Sameh ElBadry

Characterisation of the mechanism of HIF mediated genoprotection in zebrafish
Zoe Ingold

Engineering Carbon-carbon Bond Forming Enzymes from Plants for Applications in Industrial Biotechnology
Ezra Herman

Unravelling evolutionary mechanisms of phage-bacteria interactions in spatially structured microbial communities
Jessica Downing

Genomics-guided approaches to enzyme discovery in the extremophile Galdieria sulphuraria (i-CASE)
Madeleine Inglis

Flight Control in Birds
Egle Beigaite

Characterising a novel candidate gene regulating ageing related atrophy in neurons
Alexander Setchfield

Microbial degradation of agricultural residues as feed for black soldier fly larvae (iCASE)
Sonam Sidhu

Dissecting molecular complexity in single living cells using state-of-the-art super-resolution microscopy and biophysical chemistry, one molecule at a time
Laura Wiggins

Using machine learning to predict cell type and fate in heterogeneous populations (NPIF)
Alexander Scott

How does low-temperature plasma damage the bacterial outer membrane?
Alexander Russell

Dissecting a role for ZAK-beta in skeletal muscle development using genetics and embryology in zebrafish and Xenopus
Benjamin Rowlinson

Unravelling the structural biology of the LIMD1 scaffold protein using novel NMR approaches
Katie Greenin

Maintaining effective sensory coding in the face of inter-neuronal variation
Lianne Gahan

A new mathematical framework for Aβ peptide assembly in Alzheimer’s disease
Thomas Emrich-Mills

Developing de novo architectures of photosynthetic complexes for the control of photocurrent output from reaction centres.
Molly Patterson

Re-wiring epithelial homeostasis: Papillomavirus targeting of the Hippo signalling
Jacob Leese

Investigating the molecular mechanisms underpinning the arthropod segmentation clock
Katherine Harper

The role of circRNA dysregulation during KSHV infection
Lewis Hancock

Modelling complexity and redundancy in actin polymerization
Romany Mclure

Identifying and modulating aggregation propensity in bio-pharmaceuticals (i-CASE)