Current members

 

Marina Armpi

Marina had a very succesful career in Zoi Lygerou's lab, at the Medical School of the University of Patras, Greece. She has done very elegant work to understand the role of the cell cycle-related proteins Geminin, GemC1 and McIdas in multiciliogenesis and centriole biology using advanced imaging, proteomics, biochemistry and mouse models. She joins us for the MRC NMGN Congenital Anomalies postdoc to develop preclinical models of ciliopathies for fast-tracking therapeutics.

Chloe Brotherton

After an undergrad from University of Glasgow, Chloe joins us as a PhD candidate working on RPGR and vision loss on a studentship funded by RetinaUK/Macular Society under Dr Roly Megaw. She is aiming to understand the the role of RPGR in connecting cilium maintenance, cytoskeletal regulation and disc formation, with a particular focus on its role in cones.

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Emma Hall

Post-doctoral scientist. She is fascinated by how cilia detect and integrate diverse developmental signalling pathways. She is studying how ciliary dynamics are regulated at the whole organism level, currently by trying to understand how centriolar satellites detect extracellular signals and influence ciliogenesis. Emma also is a UK eLife Ambassador and driving force behind IGC Good Research Practice initiatives!

Adam Hetherington

With a strong human developmental biology background, Adam joins us with an MSci from Dundee as a Senior Research Technician part of the LifeArc Center for Rare Respiratory Diseases. He is looking to develop patient-derived and -modelled iPSCs into robust, scalable and physiologically relevant tools for disease modelling and therapy screening applications.

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Roly Megaw

Clinical Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Consultant at NHS Lothian. Trained as a academic ophthalmologist, Roly is a PI running a group within our group whose research and clinical interests lie with the inherited retinal dystrophies, both in terms of understanding disease mechanisms and identifying novel therapeutics. He was a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow. He sits is a trustee for the Ciliopathy Alliance.

Jana Muronova

Dr Jana Muronova completed her PhD with Profs Pierre Ray and Christophe Arnoult at Université Grenoble Alpes, FR where she studied mechanisms of male infertility, centriole biogenesis and spermiogenesis in human patients and mouse models. Jana is part of our ERC CiliaCircuits team working understanding how cells control scaling of different cilia products involving post-transcriptional control during multiciliogenesis.

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Fay Newton

Fay is a postdoc in the lab focusing on the role and regulation of actin dynamics in mouse photoreceptor disc formation and has been doing pioneering work into understanding whether common pathways cause photoreceptors die in different retinitis pigmentosa models. Next steps to see if these are targetable therapeutically,

Patricia Yeyati

Senior Investigator Scientist. Developing novel cilial biosensors and cilia specific proximity labeling animal models to investigate what happens to the ever-growing different types of cilia that are being uncovered during development and how are they affected in disease? What are the compositional changes on which these different types of cilia are built upon? Could we use this information to modulate the outcome of genetic diseases?

Rasmus Hejlesen

Rasmus joins as as a Postdoctoral Research Associate, bringing his passion for genome editing to the study of rare respiratory diseases. He completed his PhD at Aarhus University in Denmark, where he used gene-edited zebrafish to investigate metabolism, muscle function, and respirometry. A self-proclaimed gene editing enthusiast, Rasmus will apply these approaches in mammalian systems to develop new therapeutic strategies targeting rare respiratory disorders as part of the LifeArc Centre.

Carlos López Solarat

Completing his PhD at the University of Vigo on molecular mechanisms and the phenotypic diversity associated with Bardet-Biedl syndrome, Carlos joins us from Galicia to focus on centrosomal proteins and their role in metabolic health in collaboration with Prof. Robert Semple. This work focuses particularly on rare syndromes such as Alström syndrome, SOFT syndrome and MOPD2.

Sreeja Mitra

Sreeja completed a BSc in microbiology in India and an MSc in genomic data science at the University of Leeds before joining us as part of the MSCA DTN Cilia-AI. Here she will be looking to integrate imaging, proteomic and transcriptomic data during renal ciliopathy disease progression, flexing both wet-lab and computational skill sets to wrangle signatures of altered cell states.

Sophie Nakford

After a maternity leave, Sophie is writing up thesis work her novel tools for therapeutic genome editing for rare genetic diseases like the ciliopathies. As an Australian, she was awarded an Edinburgh Global Research Scholarship and a Principal’s Career Development Scholarship to join us!

Linda Nguyen

Linda is an MRC DTP Precision Medicine PhD candidate shared between Mill lab, Roly Megaw and Catalina Vallejos. She bridges wet lab discovery and dry lab data wrangling in her PhD studying why photoreceptors die in different models of retinitis pigmentosa (RP) using scRNAseq to explore altered cell states.