I joined Oxford Physics in March 2022 as a Royal Society and Wellcome Trust Sir Henry Dale Fellow.
My research centres on physical mechanisms of biological processes. My early work focused on biophysical dissection of bacterial biofilms. More recently, I have studied mechanisms of eukaryotic DNA replication using single-molecule imaging.
My research group aims to understand how epigenetic information is maintained in time. We study chromatin, the protein-DNA complex that packages DNA in eukaryotic cells. The basic unit of chromatin is the nucleosome, in which DNA is wrapped around histone proteins. Chromatin is partitioned into distinct functional domains that determine cellular identity. Nucleosomes carry domain-specific epigenetic labels that modulate chromatin structure and dynamics. During DNA replication, chromatin undergoes a major structural rearrangement. First, nucleosomes are disassembled from parental DNA, followed by their reassembly on duplicated DNA from the pool of recycled parental and new histones. We employ interdisciplinary strategies, which span real-time single-molecule imaging, biochemistry and molecular biophysics, to probe chromatin dynamics during DNA replication. In particular, we investigate the effect of domain-specific epigenetic labels on nucleosome dynamics to unravel how chromatin structures and their associated epigenetic landscape are maintained.