C.V.
Biography
I grew up in Southampton, UK, where I was exposed to science from an early age thanks to the enthusiam of my chemist father. Rebelling, I favoured biology, and a childhood pastime foraging for mushrooms in the New Forest, as well as a fascination with disease inclined me towards studying microbes. Officially my career in science begun as an undergraduate in Microbiology at Cardiff University, UK, in 2009, where I completed my honours research supervised by Dr Julian Marchesi, characterising metagenomic fosmid library clones expressing novel bile salt hydrolase enzymes. Recognising how much I enjoyed the freedom and creativity of independent research, I decided to stay at Cardiff University for a Masters by Research (MRes) in 2012. I spent a year working with Dr Tom Connor untangling the population genomics of Salmonella enterica serovars Paratyphi B and Java, and undertook a short research stay at the Sanger Institute, Cambridge UK, conducting metabolic profiling experiments.
Intrigued and excited by the complexities of Salmonella genetics and pathogenesis, I moved to the University of Liverpool, UK in 2013 to undertake my PhD in the group of Professor Jay Hinton. Applying the genomics skills I had learnt during my masters reseach, I got stuck into trying to understand the genetic mechanisms behind the emergence of a novel pathovar of Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium causing epidemic bloodstream infections in sub-Saharan Africa. The most striking differentiating feature of the African Salmonella genomes was the presence of a novel prophage repertoire, and I very quickly became fascinated by the biology of temperate bacteriophages and how they influence the lives of their bacterial hosts. I spent the next four years of my PhD studying prophages from African and non-African Salmonella isolates (in particular my favourite prophage BTP1) taking advantage of the reams of RNA-seq data in possession of the lab to identify novel prophage biology from the transcriptome.
After finishing my PhD at the end of 2017, I stayed for a short postdoc in the Hinton lab before moving to Boston in 2018 to take up a postdoc fellowship in Professor Michael Baym's lab at Harvard Medical School. Unable to leave behind my fascination with bacteriophages, in the Baym lab I am using high-throughput technologies and experimental evolution to dissect the evolutionary interaction between bacterial prophages and antibiotic resistance.
Siân Owen & Rocio Canals