I completed my undergraduate degree here at Warwick University. In 2005 I actually started out on the Biological Sciences degree, but after one term I felt that I was understimulated and nothing was as exciting as I thought a university degree would be. I spoke to the person who interview back in March 2005, Orin Courtenay, and he put me straight: in my interview I'd stated I liked epidemiology, but I wasn't doing any of that on the degree I was on. So why didn't I swap to one that did include what I wanted to do? It made sense, and I immediately switched to Computational Biology, and never looked back.

Throughout my undergraduate I learnt the basics in MATLAB and S-Plus, alongside all the experimental techniques that are required of a biologist. This enabled me to acquire a couple of summer internships that I don't think I would have been qualified for, if I had stuck with the Biological Sciences degree:

July 2007 - Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew

Working with Dr. David Roberts, we looked at how climate change is altering the distribution range of Himantoglossum hircinum, or the Lizard orchid. This orchid is commonly found on mainland Europe, and until the early 20th century, was very rare in England. I compiled a database, in partnership with the Natural History Museum, of all sightings of the orchid over time, and after completing the GIS ArcView course, I constructed a series of maps that illustrated the gradual movement of the orchid north through Britain. Plotting this alongside the climate changes in Britain over time, it was clear that the alterations in the range of this orchid were due to warmer weather.

August/September 2007 - HRI

Under the URSS (Undergraduate Research Scholarship Scheme) I worked with Dr. Katherine Denby at HRI looking at key defense genes in Arabidopsis thaliana in response to infection with Botrytis cinerea. I looked at several lines of plants that had certain transcription factors either knocked out or overexpressed, and infected the seedlings with Botrytis. We found that overexpressing the transcription factors caused early senescence, which made it easier for the fungus to infect, so in future experiments, inducible promoters would be a better choice.

I found this project advantageous in that I learnt new experimental techniques, such as PCR and DNA extraction, that I hadn't done before, and gave me a head start in my final year. I also learnt imaging processing techniques, primarily in ImageJ, which I returned to in my Masters year.

In my third and final year I had to complete my dissertation on a piece of unique research:

Final year project - A simple transmission model of Tunga penetrans

Being a Computational Biologist, it was expected of me to do a computing project during my final year. I chose this project with Dr. Orin Courtenay to further my programming skills, and work on a subject that I've always loved - epidemiology.

T. penetrans is a macroparasite that is endemic in tropical countries, mainly in South and Central America: it is a problem that mainly the poor and underpriviledged experience, and can be quite painful, although rarely fatal. This parasite moves from the soil and burrows into the skin of the host (usually the feet) before expelling eggs, and finally dying. These eggs hatch, and can go on to further infect the host. As with most macroparasite infections, this causes severe morbidity to the host, but only with a high parasite burden will the infection prove fatal.

My work involved constructing an S-I-S model, as being infected does not make the host immune against further infection, with the infected compartment being broken down into degrees of burden. We wanted to look at the effect of infection in both humans and dogs, and it has been previously hypothesised that dogs transmit to humans, so models were constructed for both. The models were written in Berkeley Madonna, a new programming language for me, but not that difficult to pick up: once you've learnt one (in my case, MATLAB), you've acquired a good knowledge to be able to adapt to using other languages too.

T. penetrans infection is governed by seasonal forcing, but due to the lack of data collected on infections, most literature sited the peak infection period to occur in November each year. By adding seasonal forcing to my model, we concluded that peak infection should be toward the end of October, and future data collection should back up this claim.

All of these projects led me to become interested in using mathematics and modeling as a way of generating hypotheses in biological research. I enjoyed my undergraduate in Computational Biology so much that I wanted to continue studying it, which led me to discover, with the help of Dr. Katherine Denby, the Systems Biology DTC.