At King's College London and FSC Millport, I developed Ciona intestinalis as an experimental model for studying microbiota development, environmental variation and antimicrobial challenges. I optimised IVF and aquatic husbandry protocols to rear animals from fertilisation to adulthood.
I established germ-free juvenile culture experiments to investigate microbiota colonisation under different microbial exposure and feeding conditions. My work includes DNA and RNA extraction, PCR, RT-qPCR, and analysis of short- and long-read 16S rRNA sequencing data using R.
At Imperial College London, I conducted bacterial growth assays using Hamilton liquid-handling automation and contributed to Illumina 16S sequencing workflows. I’ve also supported teaching in R, Python and sequence analysis, and presented my research at conferences.
