Like many children, I had a natural curiosity for the living world from a young age. My childhood was filled with bug-hunting, pond-dipping and watching David Attenborough documentaries. As a young adult, the books I read on biology and evolution became a bridge between my childhood curiosity and my adult obsession. I'm fortunate that my career allows me to indulge in my long-standing passion.
Having earned an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh and a DPhil in evolutionary biology from the University of Oxford, I am now a professor of microbial ecology and evolution at the University of Bath in the U.K., where my lab uses an approach called experimental evolution, which allows the observation of evolution in real-time using microbes. Very broadly, we are interested in the patterns and processes that shape life’s resilience and innovations and study these by tracking the fate of mutations within a population, as determined by natural selection, within bacterial populations.
