Newcastle University

I am very fortunate to have been selected for a fully funded 4-year PhD studentship position in Suzanne Madgwick's lab in Newcastle University. In our lab, we study the cell biology of mouse oocyte meiosis I, specifically how this unique cell type regulates its cell cycle to produce viable cells for fertilisation. My project is deducing how non-CDK1 bound cyclin B1 is targetted for destruction in prometaphase I and how this pathway differs from the canonical metaphase I destruction of cyclin B1. The studentship thus far has given me in-depth experience in the following techniques: specialised cell culture; microinjection; mutagenesis/cloning; PCR; immunoprecipitations; fluorescence microscopy; Western blotting. This project has so far lead to one co-authorship paper. I very much look forward to continuing this fascinating project

Newcastle University

I initially started at Newcastle University on the Biomedical Sciences program where I first developed my love for the intricacies of bioschemistry. I was able to develop an in-depth understanding into many aspects of this field with the help from world-renouned researchers. This course was supplemented with many practical sessions which developed my skillset and core understanding as a scientist. As part of this degree, I undertook a number of optional modules which includes bioinformatics; genetic medicine; business for bioscientists and Cancer and disease.

My third year 8-week wet-lab dissertation project was undertaken in Neil Perkins' lab on the project "The role of NF-kB subunit phosphorylation and its effects on the DNA damage response" in which I recieved a First class grade. My masters year dissertation project was also conducted in the Perkins' lab titled "The mechanisms of CHK1 inhibitor resistance" and was graded First Class. This included a 12-week long wet-lab placement with in-depth use of Western blotting; mammalian cell culture; qPCR. This project resulted in two co-author publications.

Fulston Manor School

A-level: Biology (A); Mathematics (B); Chemistry (C); Geography AS (A)

GCSE: 10 Total - 6A*-A including: Biology (A*); Chemistry (A*); Physics (A); Mathematics (A); English language and literature (B,B);

Additional: Level 3 qualification in Algebra

Coded in: Python

MUDS is a series of command-line tools I have developed to aid me and others in my lab run protein-protein docking simulations as part of my PhD project. The current goal is to produce a series of peptide ligands and dock these to PDB structures as receptors, to deduce where these ligands could be binding. I have utilised the Lightdock Server, developed by Jiménez-García et al.¹ which performs all of the docking simulations for me and has been incredibly useful thus far. I then plan on running these docking configurations through binding affinity/dissociation constant calculators to determine which receptor and configuration is most likely being used in-vivo. This will generate a lot of data, thus an automated approach is best in order to keep files organised with consistant naming conventions, reducing human error.

MUDS_import takes locations of a .pdb ligand file and a folder of .pdb receptors and generates a folder for each ligand/receptor pair for organisation and naming convention purposes.
MUDS_submit runs through each folder generated by MUDS_import, opens the browser and simulates the button presses and form inputs required to submit each folder/ligand to the lightdock simulation server. After which I then manually download a .tz file containing the top 100 docks for each docking pair and put the file in their respective folders.

MUDS_progidy then extracts the top 10 docking files for each folder, and runs them through the PRODIGY command line tool developed by Bonvin et al.² which calculates binding affinities and dissociation constants. The output is sent to a .txt file by this script and then organised into a .xlsx file for analysis.