I'm lucky enough to work with a talented team to try and uncover what makes pathogens successful. We leverage techniques across the fields of phylogenetics, population genetics and computational biology to map spatio-temporal drivers of disease.

Pooja's research focuses on the retrieval, detection and analysis of pathogen genomes from historical samples to trace their evolutionary journey across time. Her primary focus is on the evolution of bacterial and protozoan species, and she has previously worked on species such as Yersinia pestis, Borrelia recurrentis and Plasmodium vivax. Through the combined analysis of ancient and contemporary genomes, her work strives to understand the fundamental evolutionary processes that have influenced the genomes and geographical distribution of these species today.

With a background in insect symbiosis, I am fascinated by host-microbe interactions and how different hosts shape microbial genome evolution. My work focuses primarily on using ancient DNA to understand more about the population structure and genome evolution of microbes infecting animals and humans. Fundamentally, I love the intersection between history, anthropology and genomics that working with ancient DNA represents.

I am a computational biologist working on pathogen (meta)genomics. I am currently interested in pathogen evolution and transmission at the human-animal interface (i.e., animal-->human, human-->animal, human-->animal-->human). More broadly, I am interested in uncovering the molecular and ecological determinants of zoonotic outbreaks, and how to pre-empt and prevent them.

I am a PhD student in the BBSRC LIDo program, interested in aDNA, bioinformatics, tool development and lab work/method development. My current work in the lab is focused on questions of host adaptation, and zoonotic disease jumps in pathogens contemporarily found in animal hosts but which have been recovered from past human archaeological teeth, suggesting they infected over a broader range historically.

Selin is a PhD researcher working across immunology, viral evolution and computational analysis. A PhD focuses on understanding the drivers of T-cell cross-reactivity in Coronaviruses with a view to informing vaccine design.