Alumni
Viktoria Brunner
Viki undertook her DPhil studies through the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience DTP and used the large CRyPTIC dataset of M. tuberculosis genomes to identify putative mutations in the RNA polymerase that compensate for the fitness cost introduced by mutations that confer resistance to rifampicin. She was examined in December 2025 and since then has been working as a postdoctoral researcher in the MMM Unit.
Heather Steele-Stallard
Heather came to our lab and did a four month research project in 2024. She analysed how similarly (or otherwise) different members of the same antibiotic class perform when on 96-well broth microdilution plates.
Charlotte Lynch
Charlotte joined FowlerLab in October 2021 as a postdoc to work on AMR prediction using machine learning as part of the EU Horizon 2020 project CompBioMed2. Before this she was a postdoc in the Biochemistry Department, working on biomolecular simulations of ion channels and nanopores. Both her undergraduate and DPhil degrees were in Materials Science, also at Oxford. After she left in September 2023, she worked with Sam Sheppard in the Department of Biology and in October 2026 started as a Lecturer in Chemistry at the University of Bath.
Alice Brankin
Alice was examined for her DPhil in Clinical Medicine, supervised by Philip Fowler and Sarah Walker, with funding from the Nuffield Department of Medicine in January 2023. The topic of her DPhil was predicting fluoroquinolone resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. She previously undertook both Masters and Undergraduate degrees in Biochemistry at the University of York. Her interests are in protein structure and antibiotic resistance in M. tuberculosis. After leaving the lab, she worked for the World Health Organization and is currently working as a Computational Chemist for LifeArc.
Matthew Johnson
Matty did his Part II research project as part of his MBiochem at the University of Oxford in our group. During his time here he developed Machine Learning models to predict unknown mutations which confer resistance to TB antibiotics, specifically focusing on isoniazid. Outside of the lab, he’s a keen swimmer and a big Liverpool fan!
Oliver Adams
Oliver did his first rotation in the group from Jan-Mar 2017 as part of his Interdisciplinary Biosciences DTP DPhil before working in Simon Newstead's group in Biochemistry learning structural biology techniques. He was supervised by myself and Simon and passed his DPhil viva in August 2021. His thesis is entitled Structural & Biophysical Characterisation of M. tuberculosis MmpL3. He is working as a postdoctoral researcher in Simon Newstead’s group in Biochemistry.
Alexander Jackson
Alexander did his Part II research project between Oct 2019-May 2020 and studied how various mutations in Penicillin Binding Proteins from Neisseria gonorrhoeae confer resistance to beta-lactam antibiotics. He collaborated with Professor Chris Dowson's group at Warwick University.
Joshua Carter
Josh was a Rhodes Scholar did his Masters degree with us that he successfully defended in June 2019. He applied different machine-learning approaches to predicting the effect of single nucleotide polymorphisms in the pncA gene on the action of pyrazinamide, one of the four first-line anti-tubercular compounds.
Dominykas Lukauskis
Dom did his research project for his Biochemistry undergraduate degree in the group between September 2018 and March 2019 and worked on determining how the free energy of binding of isoniazid to its target, KatG, is influenced by mutations in M. tuberculosis, using molecular dynamics simulations. He is now studying for a PhD at UCL in the group of Francesco Gervasio.
Mark Hamblin
Mark did his fourth year (Part II) research project for his biochemistry undergraduate degree jointly in my group and Simon Newstead's in Biochemistry working on solving the structures of several M.tuberculosis proteins.
Firdaus Samsudin
Firdaus studied for his DPhil, Improving Oral Drug Delivery: Computational Studies of Proton Dependent Oligopeptide Transporters under the supervision of PWF. He published two key papers which you can read about here and here. He worked then with Professor Syma Khalid at Southampton University for a few years and since 2019 has worked at the A*STAR Bioinformatics Institute in Singapore where he is now a Senior Scientist.