I am a final year PhD student working in the Mechanochemical Cell Biology department within the Biomedical Cell Biology (BCB) division of the Medical School.
My PhD title is: Mechanical Deformations in Kinetochores During Directed Chromosome Motion.

I am a member of the McAinsh lab, whose main focus is the alignment, and ultimate separation, of sister chromatids during mitosis. While some members of my lab are interested in kinesin activity along microtubules, I am interested in the machinery responsible for binding the chromosomes to the mitotic spindle, known as kinetochores.

For more information, please explore the tabs above (this page is ever under construction, so tabs will hopefully continue to appear).

Publications
Further to this, I am a published author on a paper regarding the onset of anaphase, the stage where sister chromatids are separated:

Vázquez-Novelle et al. (2014) Cdk1 inactivation terminates mitotic checkpoint surveillance and stabilizes kinetochore attachments in anaphase. Curr. Biol. 24(6) 638–45 (PubMed)

My contribution to the paper was to track kinetochores in human (HeLa) cells lacking the ability to degrade CyclinB1 at the onset of anaphase. This led to a state (dubbed pseudoanaphase) in which kinetochores weren't separated in the usual tidy fashion, kinetochores continuing to exhibit back-and-forth motion into pseudoanaphase (usually only seen during metaphase – click here to learn more).

The McAinsh Lab website can be found here.