I was born in the rural heartlands of England and began my academic journey with a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and microbiology in Nottingham. My thesis, supervised by Dr Gareth McVicker, concerned antibiotic resistance in a highly pathogenic serovar of E. coli. During this degree, I completed an Erasmus project in Tarragona, Spain, at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili, in the department of oenology (the study of wine). This was again microbiology-based and involved investigating the combinatorial influence on wine quality of different non-Saccharomyces yeast strains with Oenococcus bacteria. Shifting to the biomedical sphere, I subsequently completed a master’s degree at the University of York in molecular medicine. My thesis, in Professor Paul Genever’s lab, concerned the use of bioinformatics to classify mesenchymal cell subtypes from primary patient samples.
I then decided to take an academic break and travel extensively. My travels exposed me to the incredible diversity of animal and plant life and ignited a strong interest in evolutionary biology.

I am now completing a second master’s degree in evolutionary genomics and systems biology in Vienna. I am in my second year and have come to the Pallares lab in beautiful Tübingen to complete a rotation project looking at identifying global modifiers in Drosophila by studying differences in their transcriptional networks in response to diet changes. I joined the lab in September 2025 as an intern.