I completed my BSc in Biological Sciences and MSc Molecular Medicine at The University of Essex. During my MSc I also undertook a 3 month project placement at the Cancer Research Institute at the University of Cambridge, where I completed my dissertation on the cycling kinetics of the androgen receptor in oestrogen receptor negative breast cancer cells. I subsequently spent another year at the Cancer Research institute where I joined the Hannon lab as a Research Assistant, working on the characterisation of the silencing machinery in early Drosophila Melanogaster embryos and analysis of chromatin marks at transposon insertions.

In 2016 I joined Ioannis Nezis’s lab at The University of Warwick where I completed my PhD. My project involved the characterisation of nuclear factors which interacted with core autophagy machinery (Atg8 family proteins), specifically studying their functional relevance at a transcriptional level. All experimental work during my PhD was completed in the model organism Drosophila Melanogaster.

In 2020, I joined Simon Wilkinson’s lab at the Institute of Genetics and Cancer, University of Edinburgh as a Postdoc. Here I worked on establishing the role of ER-phagy receptor protein CCPG1 in the regulation of ER-phagy in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) mouse models.

In my current role here at the MRC PPU, I am working in Amos Liang’s lab, where I am interested in understanding the role of Er-phagy during cancer metastasis and understanding the crosstalk between ER-associated degradation (ERAD), the unfolded protein response pathway (UPR) and ER-phagy.