Urbana, Illinois, United States
My research focuses on understanding the evolution of RNA viruses using computational and virological approaches. I started my career at David Evans's lab at the university of Warwick-UK (Poliovirus/PhD/2011-2016), before moving to Christopher Brooke's lab at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana-USA (Influenza virus/postdoc/2017-2022) and currently at Marco Vignuzzi's lab at A*STAR Infectious disease Labs in Singapore (Arbovirus/SRF/2023-).
My research focuses on understanding the evolution of RNA viruses using computational and virological approaches. I started my career at David Evans's lab at the university of Warwick-UK (Poliovirus/PhD/2011-2016), before moving to Christopher Brooke's lab at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana-USA (Influenza virus/postdoc/2017-2022) and currently at Marco Vignuzzi's lab at A*STAR Infectious disease Labs in Singapore (Arbovirus/SRF/2023-).
I completed my PhD on October 2016 at the University of Warwick under the supervision of Professor David J. Evans. I recently joined Dr. Christopher Brook lab as a postdoc at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). My research aims to understand the biological machinery that governs viral evolution. During my PhD I utilized Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to study recombination - a crucial evolutionary mechanism - in poliovirus. My work with Dr. Brooke focuses on studying the Defective Interfering (DI) particles in Influenza Virus. Understanding how viruses evolve will help us to predict their behaviors and consequently develop 'smart' and more efficient vaccines. My goal is to succeed in my studies at the UIUC and build a more comprehensive understanding of how viruses evolve in particular, and how evolution works in general.
Investigated the viral and cellular determinants that influence the process of recombination, using poliovirus as a tractable model system. I gained an excellent experience on a variety of laboratories techniques including PCR, cloning, and Next Generation Sequencing. Delivered talks about results of my project at the annual conferences of the Microbiology Society (UK, Liverpool, March 2016) and the American society of Virology (USA, Virginia Tech, June 2016)
During my PhD I was about to a) develop skills in using NGS simulation to establish and optimise a bioinformatics pipeline b) improve scripting skill in R and Perl to write several essential codes for the biological and statistical analysis.
Developed an experience in analysing NGS datasets - produced by several platforms including Illumina and PacBio - using software such as Bowtie2, SAMtools and SMRT portal.
During my PhD I had a chance to visit Dr. Andrew Macadam's Lab at National Institute for Biological Standards and Control (NIBSC) for two weeks. During my visit, I gained a hands-on experience in preparing the NGS library, loading the samples into the MiSeq instrument, and uploading the results to the Illumina BaseSpace Cloud for the subsequent analysis.