News

L-R: Dr. Emma Roberts, Dr. Carolin Kobras, Dr. Laura de Nies

Dr Carolin Kobras, awarded a 2024 BBSRC Fellowship (Stracy group)

Carolin’s fellowship project aims to understand antibiotic tolerance in Staphylococcus aureus, combining high-throughput phenotyping, experimental evolution, and comparative and functional genomic approaches. Preliminary work for this project was kindly funded through a Dunn School E.P.A. Postdoc Research Grant and a Medical Science Division Pump-Priming Award. Before joining the University of Oxford, Carolin investigated the genetic stepping stones to penicillin resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae at the University of Sheffield, which allowed her to develop a unique research approach of integrating molecular microbiology with comparative population genomics.

On this award, Carolin said “I am thrilled to have been awarded this fellowship to pursue my independent research project on antibiotic tolerance, which will help us to understand how bacteria survive antibiotics, even if they are not resistant to them. I am deeply grateful for all the support I have received.”

Dr Laura de Nies, awarded a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship (Stracy group)

Laura’s project explores how antibiotic-induced Enterobacterial blooms are established in the gut microbiome and how they, in turn, drive the spread of plasmid-derived antibiotic resistance. Before joining the Stracy Lab at the Dunn School, Laura completed a PhD at the University of Luxembourg, where she investigated the mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance across diverse microbial reservoirs.

Dr Emma Roberts, awarded a Wellcome Trust Early Career Fellowship (Raff group)

Emma is looking at how cells maintain the right number of centrosomes, which are important organelles involved in cell division and microtubule organisation. This is important both to understand how a cell is organised, and because having the wrong number of centrosomes is linked to diseases including cancer. In her project, she will be developing a system to measure the local activity of several key regulators of centrosome assembly to investigate how centrosome duplication is coordinated with cell division.  Before joining the Dunn School, Emma studied for a PhD in cell cycle regulation at the Francis Crick Institute in London.

On this award, Emma said “I’m really happy to have been awarded this fellowship – not only will give me the funding to carry out my project, but it will also help me develop my scientific independence.”

We also congratulate:

• Dr Jacob Wilde (Foster lab) and Dr Karishma Patel (Ahel lab) who were awarded EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowships.
• Dr Jie Deng (Foster lab) who was awarded a Royal Society Newton Fellowship.
• and Dr Sarah Woodward (Slack lab) who was awarded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowships.