Email: r.snowdon@warwick.ac.uk

At-a-glance PhD summary

PhD Project: The macromolecular machine of dividing bacteria: Z-ring to peptidoglycan

My research is part of a slightly larger project in MOAC to investigate the process of bacterial cell division. This involves working with the above people, as well as another student from my year group, Dan Turner. Currently this involves growing bacterial cultures to produce some of the involved proteins, which we aim to study using various biophysical and molecular modelling based techniques. Alongside this Dan is trying to mathematically model some characteristics of bacteria as they divide.

MSc research

As part of the MSc year of the MOAC course I completed three eight week research miniprojects in different areas of science. Ultimately the experiences of each played a large role in helping me to decide what I wanted to study for the PhD side of the course. The projects I worked on were:

Theoretical: 'Predicting T cell receptor ligands using peptide libraries and Bayesian networks', with Dr. Hugo van den Berg (Mathematics)

Physical Science: 'Peptidoglycan structure and reactions', with Prof. Alison Rodger (Chemistry)

Wet Biology: 'Structure-function analysis of the Carbohydrate Recognition Domain of the Human C-type lectin DC-SIGNR receptor via solution NMR', with Dr. Daniel Mitchell (Clinical Sciences Research Institute) and Dr. Ann Dixon (Chemistry)