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Hollfelder Group

Ph.D student

Joined the lab: April 2020

Background and Current Projects:

I studied Biotechnology with Management at Imperial College London and obtained a Joint Honours BSc in 2018. Between September 2018 and 2019, I worked at a pharmaceutical management consultancy company, Eradigm, where I worked on projects for top pharma clients ranging from CAR T therapy to implementing value-based healthcare.

During my bachelor's degree, I was a research assistant in the lab of Professor Alison Smith during the summer months, whereby I was involved in several different projects. These were: metabolic engineering, synthetic biology, and droplet microfluidics research for algae. One project I was involved in was the design of riboswitches in the green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii as modular controlled-gene expression units for synthetic biology. Additionally, in collaboration with the lab of Professor Chris Abell, I worked on FADS (fluorescent activated droplet sorting) of the unicellular brown algae Phaeodactylum tricornutum to distinguish high lipid producing strains for use in biofuel research.

My research in the Hollfelder group is focused on the further innovation of droplet microfluidic devices, with an emphasis on the directed evolution of novel enzymes obtained through functional metagenomics. Furthermore, I will be looking to leverage the high-throughput nature of microfluidics to elucidate the nature of multi-dimensional sequence space. I will also be looking at the next generation of microfluidic devices, including fabrication through laser ablation, machine-learning at the edge, microcontroller integration, and experiment automation.

Interests: In my free time, I enjoy playing the drum kit, guitar, and keyboard. Additionally, I like squash, cooking (mainly Indian cuisine), and finding the next best whiskey bar! I also have a keen interest in meditation, phenomenology, philosophy, entrepreneurship, programming, and electronics.

 

Publications

[1] Mehrshahi, P.; Nguyen, G. T. D. T.; Gorchs Rovira, A.; Sayer, A.; Llavero-Pasquina, M.; Lim Huei Sin, M.; Medcalf, E. J.; Mendoza-Ochoa, G. I.; Scaife, M. A.; Smith, A. G. Development of Novel Riboswitches for Synthetic Biology in the Green Alga Chlamydomonas. ACS Synth. Biol. 2020, 9, 1406– 1417, DOI: 10.1021/acssynbio.0c00082.   Link

Contact Details

80 Tennis Court Road
Cambridge, CB2 1GA
email: ejm208@cam.ac.uk
01223 766 046

Job Title

PhD student - BBSRC DTP