I am a Royal Society Career Development Fellow and Co-PI of the Cellular Origins of Immune Disease Group at Newcastle University.
Using a computational and systems-biology approach, my independent research program maps the critical crosstalk between the nervous and immune systems during prenatal development, investigating how these interactions regulate blood stem cell niches and functions. My fellowship project takes ‘A systems approach to unravel neural regulation of embryonic haematopoiesis.’
I specialize in bioinformatics, single-cell analysis, immunology, developmental biology, and neurobiology.
You can navigate to the following pages for my:
Postdoctoral Research & Consortia Leadership
My research articles are listed on a separate page, and can also be found using my ORCID or Google Scholar profile.
My postdoctoral research focused on driving the intellectual development and publication of ‘An integrated single cell and spatial omics atlas of human prenatal development’ (in preprint, and review), contributing to the global Human Cell Atlas (HCA) Initiative.
In this role, I took on significant project management and scientific diplomacy responsibilities, coordinating over 90 co-authors across 20+ international institutions (including Harvard, UCL, and the Kennedy Institute). For these contributions, I was awarded the Leading Edge Fellowship (2023) and was named a finalist for the British Society for Immunology (BSI) Early Career Researcher’s Award (2023).
PhD Research
I moved to Newcastle in 2018 to begin my PhD, funded by the Barbour Foundation and supervised by Professor Muzlifah Haniffa. Working collaboratively within the HCA consortium, my doctoral project, "Using single-cell multiomics to characterise haematopoiesis in human fetal bone marrow," was published in Nature in September 2021.
This work served as a crucial reference to contextualize haematological disorders and was honored with:
The Newcastle University Faculty of Medical Sciences Doctoral Thesis Prize (2022)
An Honourable Mention for the International Birnstiel Award for Doctoral Research in Molecular Life Sciences (2021)
An Honourable Mention for the Doctoral Researcher’s Award in Natural and Life Sciences (2022)
Early Academic Background
I was born and raised in London and am a first-generation Jamaican migrant. My academic journey began at University College London (UCL) in 2014, where I pursued an MSci in Biological Sciences.
During my third year, I completed an exchange program at the University of Queensland, Australia, conducting independent research in the mathematical modeling of antibiotic resistance under Associate Professor Jan Engelstaedter.
In my final year, I wrote my Master’s dissertation, "Identifying plant genes of unknown function," under the supervision of Professor Christophe Dessimoz and Dr Natasha Glover, practicing object-oriented programming at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.
I graduated from UCL with First Class Honours in Biological Sciences in 2018.