Hi, my name is Tim Coker and I am an EPSRC-funded student at the Systems Biology DTC, currently in my final year of Ph.D. study.

My undergraduate degree was a B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Birmingham, which I obtained in July 2012. While at Birmingham I became particularly interested in Plant, Molecular, and Cell Biology. My undergraduate project was supervised by Prof. Noni Franklin-Tong, and involved the study of a receptor-ligand couple important for Papaver rhoeas (field poppy) self-incompatibility, heterologously expressed in protoplasts generated from Arabidopsis seedlings.

Although from a Biological Sciences background, I have always been fascinated by both Mathematics and the Sciences in general. It is both the multidisplinary skills and the use of modern molecular techniques that draws me towards Systems Biology. On the Theoretical side, I have particularly enjoyed using software such as Matlab to model Biological systems, as well as to analyse and present data, and would like to learn more about this in the future. I have also found interest in aspects of statistics, such as probability and clustering, and would like to learn more about how these can be used in conjunction with high-throughput molecular techniques.

My first M.Sc. miniproject was "Individual-based Biofilm Modelling of Aging Microbes". This was a theoretical project supervised by Dr Jan-Ulrich Kreft and Robert Clegg at the University of Birmingham, and it involved using the individual-based microbial growth model iDynoMiCS to infer the evolutionary benefits of different aging strategies in microbial biofilms.

My second miniproject was on "Cell-specific Pathogen Profiling", supervised by Dr Miriam Gifford. In this I used fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to isolate pathogen-contacting cells from Arabidopsis cotyledons innoculated with the oomycete pathogen Hyaloperonospora arabidopsidis (Hpa). Subsequent microarray analysis allowed comparison of gene expression between cells from uninfected cotyledons, and Hpa-contacting and Hpa-distal cells from infeced cotyledons. Preliminary results suggest that infection-responsive gene expression was highly localised to the cells that come in contact with the pathogen, however some expression changes were also observed in distal cells.

My Ph.D. project is entitled "Analysing Cell-Cell Signalling During Pathogen Infection". This project follows on from my second miniproject and is supervised by Dr Miriam Gifford, Prof. Jim Beynon and Prof. Orkun Soyer.

My other responsibilities at the university have included contributions to the Systems Biology Student Staff Liason Committee (SSLC) and organisation of Systems Biology DTC seminars. I am especially enthusiastic about teaching, having demonstrated in a number of postgraduate data analysis workshops and undergraduate labs, and organised and delivered Maths "refresher" sessions for the Quantitative Biology Centre (QuBiC) and the first year module "Science 101". I am currently a mentor for QuBiC.

Publications
Coker, T.L.R., Cevik, V., Beynon, J.L., & Gifford, M.L. (2015) Spatial dissection of the Arabidopsis thaliana transcriptional response to downy mildew using Fluorescence Activated Cell Sorting. Front. Plant Sci. http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2015.00527

Timothy Coker

Systems Biology DTC
Senate House
Gibbet Hill Road
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL

Email: T dot L dot R dot Coker at warwick dot ac dot uk