Employment & Research Experience

04/23- present

Senior Lecturer in Bioinformatics (Microbiomics and Medical Data Science) at the University of Leeds in Gastrointestinal Research including Bioinformatics and Honorary Research Fellow at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Involvement:

Major bioinformatics data analyses for Colo-Cohort.
Leading several other bioinformatics research projects and student supervision for MSc projects.
Focusing on international collaborations to work in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs) to target microbiome and antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
As a part of Michael Beverley Innovation Fellowship, collaboration work in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
As a part of the Horizon’s Institute Global Crucible building my collaboration with collaborators in Ghana.

11/2016 - 04/2023

University Academic Fellow at University of Leeds in Gastrointestinal Research including Bioinformatics and Honorary Research Fellow at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.

Involvement:

Leading several bioinformatics research projects. Built the capacity of bioinformatics analyses (specialism in microbiome research) within the HCAI research group at UoL. Responsible for supervision and analyses of multiple medical projects involving Genomics, Statistics and Bioinformatics.
I am a co-investigator (bioinformatics lead) on three large awards: (1)from the USA Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “models of dysbiosis study”; and (2) from the AMRC charity Guts UK with UoL and Newcastle University collaborators “Colorectal cancer cohort study”. (3) from the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy (BSAC) “Impact of antimicrobial prescribing during the COVID-pandemic on MDRO colonisation and the gut microbiome”.
As a co-investigator (Co-I) I have secured one industry funded research grant (Hayashibara Co. Ltd.) for the project “Effect of trehalose on C. difficile infection”.
Analyses of patients’ gut microbiome during a clinical trial of ridinilazole (Summit Therapeutics), a narrow-spectrum antibiotic for C. difficile infection.
Gut microbiome analyses of samples from a phase 3b clinical trial examining the effects of a novel extended fidaxomicin dosage regimen (Astellas Pharma), designed to prevent C. difficile germination, to reduce the rate of CDI recurrence

11/2014- 08/2016

Senior Research Scientist at Gut Health and Food Safety, Institute of Food Research & Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia.

Involvement:

Responsible for leading bioinformatics side of the projects including experiment planning and project planning, data handling and analyses for a number of large scale NGS projects in the lab. One of the significant project was the Baby Associated MicroBiota of the Intestine (BAMBI) Study, which aimed to characterise the microbiota of preterm and term infants over time (from birth to 1 year of age) and to examine how external factors (including probiotic supplementation and antibiotics) modulate early life microbiota development. Another major project was Zoo Animal Microbiome, which focused on understanding the microbiome of captive animal population. This may open up avenues for isolating new health promoting bacterial strains for human and at the same time determine animal-specific microbial therapies in order to promote captive animal health.

0 2/2013- 10/2014

Research Fellow at Singapore Centre on Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE), Cluster 2: Meta-’omics and systems biology, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

Involvement:

Responsible for in-house sequence data handling and analyses of different kinds (metagenomic, metatranscriptomic, amplicon, TRFLP etc.) from several projects which include various within group and outside collaborative projects of environmental and medical samples. Beside these, involved in applying different statistical techniques to help in better sampling strategies, design, modeling and analyses techniques.

02/2012- 01/2013

Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow, at Department of Molecular and Clinical Pharmacology, University of Liverpool, UK.

Involvement:

Worked on Human genomics projects (e.g. drug-induced hypersensitivity study) including microarray and sequence data analyses.

11/2010- 01/2012

Postdoc, Research and Teaching Staff, at ZBIT centre for Bioinformatics, University of Tübingen, Germany.

07/2007- 10/2010

Pursued Ph.D. and worked as Research and Teaching Staff, at Algorithms in Bioinformatics, ZBIT, University of Tübingen, Germany;

04/2007- 06/2007

Research assistant in Genetic Epidemiology, University of Ulm, Germany.

02/2006 - 03/2007

Research assistant in Applied Statistics project at Institute for Mathematical Stochastic, University of Karlsruhe, Germany.