The Team
I am a group leader and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at Aberystwyth University. I'm interested in meiosis, polyploidy, gene editing and DNA repair, all things that generate new DNA sequences or sequence combinations, providing the raw material for natural and artificial selection. Before moving to the UK, I studied and worked in Australia (PhD, University of Adelaide), France (PostDoc, INRA Versailles) and the US (PostDoc, Harvard University).
Dr Andrew Lloyd
Candida is our resident lab wizard and cytology guru. She has a wealth of experience in plant meiosis and molecular and cell biology. Her interests also include moss, CT scanning, crop domestication and more. Candida is investigating meiosis in our favourite allopolyploid Arabidopsis suecica to gain insights into how plants with doubled genomes manage accurate chromosome segregation.
Dr Candida Nibau
Maria Da Costa
Maria has a background in equine science, though we’ve convinced her that plants are cool too! Maria is bringing her biochemistry experience to the lab to study recombination proteins. She will be looking to develop ways to transiently modify meiotic recombination patterns in plants.
Aled has a background in mathematics and is our resident bioinformatician. He's mad enough to do things like assemble and annotate polyploid genomes and provides genomics support to the ModRec project.
Aled Evans
Julia Vallusova
Julia is an undertaking her PhD looking to develop transgene free gene editing approaches using nanoparticles. For this she is teaming up with colleagues at Queen's University Belfast who have expertise in nanoparticle synthesis for drug delivery.
Lucia Martinez
Lucia is a master's student, interested in endosymbiotic evolution and how DNA can move between the chloroplast and the nucleus.
Heledd Morgan
Heledd is a master's student, looking into the role of RECQ4 helicase in polyploid meiosis.
Ffion Owen
Ffion is an Undergraduate at Aberystwyth University currently undertaking a Year in Industry placement in the lab.
Ffion's project is investigating the regulation of FANCM an important regulator of meiotic recombination.
Oliver is an Undergraduate at Aberystwyth University currently undertaking a Year in Industry placement in the lab.
Oliver is generating CRISPR/Cas mutants of key meiosis genes.