Cellular and organismal life is possible due to millions of exquisitely coordinated signalling events. The goal of my research group is to understand how tyrosine phosphatases regulate cell signalling. This large family of enzymes has been highly understudied compared to its more famous kinase counterpart.

We investigate these phosphatases in the context of signalling to the actin cytoskeleton and in virus infection. We use a combination of quantitative microscopy, protein interaction analyses and C. elegans genetics.

I started my research group in 2024 in the Randall Centre at King’s with a Career Development Award from Wellcome Trust. In my doctoral and postdoctoral work, I have investigated signalling events that dramatically remodel the actin cytoskeleton during cell division and pathogen motility respectively.

My PhD work in the Glotzer lab at the University of Chicago detailed the molecular mechanism underlying division plane positioning in eukaryotic cells. During my postdoc in the Way lab at the Francis Crick Institute, I used Vaccinia virus as a model to demonstrate that the outputs of phosphotyrosine signalling are dependent on network organisation.