DOCTORAL
CANDIDATES
Background
I received my integrated master’s degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology in 2021 from the University of Glasgow. My interest in cancer research started to develop during an internship at Dr Vignir Helgason’s group of the Wolfson Wohl Cancer Research Institute (WWCRI) focusing on metabolism in acute myeloid and chronic myeloid leukaemia. Following that experience I took up an opportunity as an industrial placement student in the Oncology department of AstraZeneca, Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Fabien Garçon. My thesis focused on creating and characterising a tumour-cancer associated fibroblast organoid model suitable for high content imaging-based drug screens. Upon my return to Glasgow, I have finished my second thesis in Dr Julia Cordero’s laboratory of the WWCRI. There I focused on transcriptomics data analysis in pursuit of understanding regulation of the Piwi/piRNA pathway in Drosophila intestinal stem cells. Through my studies I have gained great passion for accelerating our understanding of disease and decided to pursue such opportunities further.
After receiving my degree, I have focused on gaining more industrial experience. In fall of 2021 I have enrolled into a 2-year graduate program in AstraZeneca, Sweden. The program gave me the opportunity to work in multiple disease areas and stages of the drug development pipeline in three different departments. Firstly, I continued working on tissue models to provide disease understanding. Specifically, I worked on precision-cut-lung-slices to understand idiopathic fibrosis under the supervision of Dr Victoria Ptasinski. Next, I transitioned into treatment delivery using barcoded hybrid extracellular vesicles under the supervision of Dr Alena Ivanova. For my final rotation I have focused on bioinformatics pipeline development for analysis of proteomics data under the supervision of Dr Bastian Shiffthaler which allowed me to strengthen my bioinformatics skills. Before enrolling into my PhD project, I also explored development of Life Science Solutions and diagnostics in Diana Biotechnologies to gain better appreciation for method development which will be useful in my doctoral work.
Research
During my doctoral project in Dr. Sinem K. Saka’s group I will focus on creating methods that will allow us to study changes in RNA processing and lifecycle in inborn errors of immunity (IEI) samples. For IEI mutations that do not impact transcription, it is yet to be understood if they lead to RNA mislocalisation, delayed splicing, translation or lowered lifetime. Methods generated by the project will not only help us study these processes at single molecule resolution, but also bring results into the wider spatial context by allowing us to evaluate mutations and mutation correction in situ.