Welcome to my home page
Here you will find details of my research interests, publications, CV and how to contact me. As of January, I have taken up the position of Leadership Fellow in Genomic Medicine at the Nuffield Department of Medicine in Oxford. Based at the Oxford Centre for Gene Function, and the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, I am a participant in the UKCRC Consortium Modernising Medical Microbiology, a project that aims to harness next-generation sequencing technologies to track and trace clinically important human pathogens.
My research interests centre on the application of population genetics tools to solving problems in human infectious diseases. Another major interest of mine is detecting the signature of natural selection within populations. My software omegaMap is designed to address that problem in recombining populations, and is available to download from this site.
Until December I was a Post-doctoral Research Scholar in Molly Przeworski's lab at the University of Chicago Department of Human Genetics. In Chicago I focused on detecting the signal of natural selection in the coding genome, in particular identifying the sites of adaptive evolution and inferring the distribution of selective effects using novel population genetics methods. We are in the process of applying these analyses to coding regions in humans and Drosophila. Prior to my appointment at the University of Chicago, I was a Research Associate at Lancaster University, where I worked with Paul Fearnhead and Peter Diggle on the epidemiology of human cases of Campylobacter, the primary cause of bacterial food poisoning. I completed my doctorate in the population genetics of meningococcal meningitis at the Peter Medawar Building for Pathogen Research in Oxford, where I was supervised by Gil McVean and Martin Maiden.
Please contact me if you have any comments or questions about the website or my research.
omegaMap
Estimating diversifying selection and functional constraint in the presence of recombination
omegaMap is a method for estimating variation in the dN/dS ratio within a gene in the presence of recombination. Click here to learn more and download the software.
