I am a PhD student at the University of East Anglia and part of the Critical Decade for Climate Change programme, funded by the Leverhulme Trust. My research focuses on the main microbial drivers of nitrous oxide flux in peatland environments, and how this is affected by land use change.
Microbes are invisibly tiny and they are the architects of our atmosphere and ecosystems. I study peatlands at both the microscopic and macroscopic level and aim to approach my research from a Systems Thinking perspective. I am interested in how ‘the whole is represented in the parts’. I use specific enzyme inhibitors and stable isotopes to study the cycling of nitrogen in soil at the molecular level. I use these results to inform how I analyse metagenomic data and use statistical methods to predict microbial communities at the ecosystem level.
I hold an MSc in Chemistry and Synthetic Biology, and an MRes in Computational Evolutionary Microbiology from the University of Bristol. My research looked at the structure and evolutionary changes of early microbial membranes using computational genomics and the synthesis of novel membrane proteins.
