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
Ffion Owen
Ffion is investigating the control of meiotic recombination and looking to identify small molecules that can boost recombination rates. Ffion's expertise covers molecular genetics, cytology, biochemistry, tissue culture... and rock climbing 🧗♀️
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.
Will Sweet-Jones
Will is a PhD student interested in trait introgression from crop wild relatives. As part of his PhD, Will is partnering with breeding company Germinal to investigate the genetic basis of rhizome formation in clover.
Holly King
Holly is an undergraduate zoologist, who we're close to convincing that plants are just as cool as animals! Holly is investigating temperature effects on plant fertility.
Dan Baker
Dan is an Undergraduate at Aberystwyth University currently undertaking a Year in Industry placement in the lab. Dan is working toward being a gene editing wizard.
Missy is an undergraduate year in industry student working on meiosis in polyploid Arabidopsis.
Missy Sullivan
