New paper: Biased phylodynamic inferences from clusters

My new paper with Simon Frost and Fei Xiang is out in Virus Evolution showing how using phylogenetic clusters for phylodynamic investigation is problematic. Importantly, false clusters can masquerade as growing epidemics despite being identified from a randomly mixing, constant-sized population. We also show how other implicit biases can have an... Read more 03 Jul 2017 - less than 1 minute read

Vet School at the Cambridge Science Festival

This year Anaid Diaz, Jackie Brearley and I co-organised the Department of Veterinary Medicine’s contribution to the Cambridge Science festival. It was a huge team effort - thank you to everyone to everyone who got involved and made it such a success! The theme of the day was One Health, showing how, by studying animal and human health side-by-s... Read more 19 Mar 2016 - 3 minute read

New paper: Rapid host switching in Campylobacter

My new paper with Daniel Wilson, Sam Sheppard and colleagues on rapid host switching in generalist Campylobacter strains has been published in The ISME Journal (open access). Campylobacter is the most commonly identified cause of bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide - with more cases than Salmonella, E. coli, Clostridium and Listeria combined. I... Read more 03 Sep 2015 - 1 minute read

STEM Fair, Duxford

Trialling one of my new outreach activities today - Build Your Own Bacteria - for STEM Team East’s annual STEM Fair Young Investigators’ Day. First we’ll discuss what features (glowing in the dark? antibiotic resistance? being able to communicate?) would make a good microbe, and then students will get to create their own 3D bacteria models. Tomo... Read more 30 Jun 2015 - less than 1 minute read

British Science Week 2015

I spent this morning with Year 4 at St. Alban’s Catholic School, Cambridge as part of their activities for British Science Week. We spoke about what can make us ill, with my growing collection of Giant Microbes as popular as ever. They were a chatty and interactive bunch, and I was completely blown away when amongst the usual answers of ‘bugs’ a... Read more 17 Mar 2015 - less than 1 minute read