Very pleased to announce that I’ve been elected an Official Fellow at Reuben College. The college was established in May 2019 and looks after graduate students; it has a particular emphasis on diversity and inclusivity. Reflecting the reality of many graduate students in Oxford, it is interdisciplinary in nature which I love and suits me […]
In this preprint, Viki Brunner shows how, using the large CRyPTIC dataset, she can recapitulate the result that susceptible M. tuberculosis samples grow faster than samples that are resistant to rifampicin (and do not have any mutation that could compensate for that effect). Using the Fisher’s exact test, she is able to confidently identify 51 […]
When predicting if an infection is resistant or susceptible to a specific antibiotic, it is all too easy to think that the infection is homogeneous and, in fact, many bioinformatic variant callers encourage that point of view. Or, at best, you can subvert the format of, say, a variant call file (VCF) by using the […]
A new paper with Lindsay Sonnenkalb as first-author has just been published in The Lancet Microbe. It is a collaboration between a number of groups, led by Stefan Niemann and in it we evolved resistance to bedaquiline in vitro. Sequencing revealed 265 genetic variants with 250 affecting Rv0678, which is the transcription regulator of mmpL5, […]
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DPhil in Computational Discovery
I have a project advertised as part of the DPhil in Computational Discovery programme at the University of Oxford to start in October 2023. This programme is jointly run with IBM and benefits from their applied research in machine learning and other shared areas of interest. The project (Project 6) aims to develop graph-based convolutional […]
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Congratulations Dr Brankin!
Alice successfully defended her thesis “Predicting Fluoroquinolone Resistance in Mycobacterium tuberculosis” yesterday. Her examiners were Professor Philip Biggin and Dr Esther Robinson. Much of Alice’s research was done during various SARS-CoV-2 lockdowns and I doubt she thought at the start she’d be using Microsoft Teams so much. Despite this she has produced some excellent research and […]