Life Sciences academic staff recognised with promotions

Julie McDonald of Life Sciences was promoted to Senior Lecturer

This year's promotion round has seen 13 academic and learning and teaching staff from the Department of Life Sciences promoted.

Professor Dan Davis, Head of Life Sciences, said: ‘Huge congratulations to everyone who was promoted - all well-deserved! Thanks too, to everyone involved in the process, including everyone who sits on our promotions panels, our line managers, mentors, people who reviewed cases, and everyone who helps organise and run things’.

Life Sciences Promotions

New Senior Lecturers

Julie McDonald, Ruben Perez-Carrasco, Emma Ransome

New Readers

Martin Brazeau, Lauren Cator, Giorgio Gilestro, Rich Gill, Nadia Guerra, James Murray, Bonnie Waring

New Senior Research Fellows

Matt Child, Dina Vlachou

New Professor

David Mann

Lauren Cator, promoted to Reader

Mosquitoes have complex and interesting life histories and behaviours. Like any other behavioural ecologist, I’m interested in characterising behavioural traits and investigating their evolutionary and ecological drivers. My work ranges from asking questions about interactions between individual insects and the pathogens they carry to how large-scale agricultural conversion will impact entire mosquito populations and local transmission risk. To address these questions my team conducts hypothesis driven research and relies on a combination of novel behavioural experiments, physiological measurements, fieldwork, genetic analyses, and theoretical modelling.

Since joining Life Sciences in 2014, we have been working to understand ‘what makes a sexy male mosquito’. This has led us down a variety of paths including using high-speed videography to understand what really happens when a male meets a female in a mating swarm (spoiler alert: the answer is that the females kick males a lot) and using experimental evolution as a novel approach for identifying phenotypic and genetic traits that respond to sexual selection.

I have also taken advantage of the highly collaborative culture and joined with colleagues in our department and the School of Public Health in investigate how mosquito respond to variation in environmental conditions and predict how they might respond in future climates to influence dengue risk. These have been extremely rewarding research experiences and have expanded my own understanding how the traits that I measure contribute to population growth and disease transmission.

Looking forward, I’m excited to continue pushing my research agenda forward, but also supporting our department, the university, and UK to build a collaborative, interdisciplinary, and inclusive research culture through my roles on the management committee, in the Institute of Infection, and as the lead of the UKRI-Defra One Health VBD Hub project.

Ruben Perez-Carrasco, promoted to Senior Lecturer 

I am a researcher in Mathematical Biology, focused on uncovering the fundamental principles of how cells make decisions and how these decisions emerge across scales: from molecular interactions to tissue-level dynamics. To tackle these questions, I use a variety of mathematical tools, including dynamical systems, stochastic dynamics, Bayesian inference, and machine learning.

Our research addresses a diverse array of biological problems, from developmental biology to synthetic biology and cancer immunotherapy. By exploring these different areas, we seek to identify the universal principles that drive cellular behaviour. For instance, our latest work has led to the development of a mathematical framework that can identify the molecular mechanisms controlling the tempo of embryo development, providing insights into why mouse and human embryos develop at different speeds.

In addition to research, I am committed to fostering a more interdisciplinary community of researchers by training the next generation of quantitative biology scientists and initiating projects like the London Mathematical Biology Conference, which recently completed its second edition. I also organize the Life Sciences Sketch Club, where we meet every month to sketch various parts of the campus. Feel free to join us if you’re around!’

Julie McDonald, promoted to Senior Lecturer

My research investigates how the microorganisms that colonise the intestine (the ‘gut microbiota”) protect us from becoming colonised by antibiotic-resistant pathogens. I joined the Life Sciences and the Centre for Bacterial Resistance Biology as Lecturer in 2020.

My lab uses a variety of complementary approaches to study mechanisms of gut colonisation resistance, including artificial gut models (aka ‘chemostat’ or ‘Robogut’models), ex vivo faecal cultures, traditional microbiology techniques, and several ‘omic’ techniques (DNA sequencing, metabolite profiling, etc). With an MRC New Investigator Research Grant, I’ve been investigating how nutrient competition and metabolite production by the gut microbiota reduces the intestinal colonisation by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.

We demonstrated that antibiotics that promote the intestinal colonisation by carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae resulted in the killing of protective gut bacteria, which reduced competition for nutrients. We demonstrated that antibiotics significantly shifted the nutrient and metabolite landscape these pathogens encountered in an antibiotic-treated intestine, which led to enrichment of nutrients, depletion of inhibitory metabolites, and promotion of Enterobacteriaceae growth.

Supported by a Wellcome Trust Career Development award, we are investigating how to harness nutrient metabolism by the healthy gut microbiota to restrict the growth of several important antibiotic resistant pathogens. Our long-term aim is to predict and restrict intestinal colonisation by these pathogens and to contribute to the development of new microbiome-based therapeutics.

David Mann, promoted to Professor

I’m a molecular biologist with a longstanding research interest in cancer. My PhD topic was regulated gene expression and that led me to work with Professor Sir Philip Cohen in Dundee on protein kinases and phosphatases, signalling enzymes that switch other proteins on or off by adding or removing phosphate. Since then I’ve worked extensively on the regulation of human cell division by protein kinases and helped discover how some of these kinases become deregulated in cancer.

My lab at Imperial has always been a very collaborative venture, particularly forging strong links with colleagues in the Department of Chemistry.  We’ve had a lot of fun using novel chemical tools to answer biological questions and recently we’ve developed a novel drug discovery platform for identifying covalent inhibitors of key oncogenes in cancer.  We have a patent on the methodology and alongside further developing our chemical hits to make them more selective and higher affinity, we’re looking to spin out our technology into a company focussed on future therapeutic development for oncology.

I am also Director of Postgraduate Studies looking after the PhD students in the Department.  My role is to ensure that Imperial’s regulations and standards are upheld but, equally importantly, to improve the lives of our PhD students through social interactions, career development opportunities, etc. This is central to our Department as the PhD students make such a large contribution to our research and teaching.