Our people

Dr Kirsten Jensen

Senior Research Officer | k.jensen@imperial.ac.uk, +44 020 7594 3058

Dr Richard Kelwick

RSE Enterprise Fellow | r.kelwick@imperial.ac.uk, +44 020 7594 3058, @rkelwick

Dr Matthew Haines
Research Associate | matthew.haines10@imperial.ac.uk

Matthew is working on a joint research collaboration with Richard Murray's lab at Caltech and funded by the NSF and EPSRC, the project is focused on developing new metrology for synthetic biology cell free systems.

Dr Alexander J. Webb
Research Associate | alexander.webb1@imperial.ac.uk, +44 020 7594 3058, @ajwebb1979

Alex is a Microbiologist with a research focus on engineering bioreporters for global health.

Dr Monisha Pathania
Research Associate | m.pathania@imperial.ac.uk, +44 07404 807 702

Monisha was a Marie Curie Sklodowska Fellow within the ITN Translocation project and was enrolled in a PhD program at the Institute for Cell and Molecular Biosciences (ICaMB), Newcastle University, UK. She completed her PhD in 2018.
Currently, Monisha is a postdoctoral fellow at MRC Centre for Molecular Bacteriology and Infection (CMBI) in Imperial College London, in the research programme led by Prof. Angelika Grundling and Prof. Paul Freemont. Her work here is focussed on providing structural and mechanistic insight into the activity of diadenylate cyclase DacA, an essential membrane protein responsible for the production of c-di-AMP in Staphylococcus aureus.

Dr Michael Crone
Research Assistant | m.crone15@imperial.ac.uk, +44 07521 249 424

Michael is currently a Research Assistant in the Freemont group working on Low Cost Viral Diagnostics as a part of a GCRF project, together with collaborators at the University of Cambridge, CSIR and University of Pretoria (South Africa). He is also a part of the UK DRI Care Research and Technology Center focusing on developing point of care diagnostics.

Dr Raphaella Jackson

Research Associate | r.jackson@imperial.ac.uk

Martin Tran

Research Assistant | martin.tran13@imperial.ac.uk

Martin is a Research Assistant working as part of the UK DRI Care Research and Technology Centre. Martin's main focus is on developing point of care diagnostics for early detection of Urinary Tract Infections for people living with Dementia.

Matas Deveikis
PhD student | m.deveikis20@imperial.ac.uk

Matas is interested in automation and biotherapeutics. He is working on developing a workflow for prototyping proteins using cell-free systems and machine learning.

Caoimhe Canavan
PhD student | caoimhe.canavan13@imperial.ac.uk

Caoimhe’s project is focused on developing metrology standards for mammalian cell-free systems. 

Dr Soo Mei Chee

Laboratory Manager | s.chee@imperial.ac.uk, +44 020 7594 8556

Soo Mei is the Laboratory Manager for the Department of Infectious Disease.

Dr Bilge Argunhan
Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellow| b.argunhan@imperial.ac.uk, @BilgeArg 

Bilge is an MSCA research fellow investigating recombinational DNA repair. During his PhD at the University of Sussex (2011-2016), Bilge employed genetics and cell biology to study meiosis. He then moved to the Tokyo Institute of Technology in Japan as a postdoctoral researcher to investigate the mechanisms of recombinational DNA repair through biochemical and genetic approaches (2016-2021). He is now combining biochemical reconstitutions with structural analyses to elucidate how Rad51 is regulated at the molecular level.

Dr Jie Zhang
Research Associate | jzhang13@ic.ac.uk

Jie used to work on influenza A viruses to understand the influence of virus evolution on its binding property using X-ray crystallography and bio-layer interferometry when she did her PhD in Francis Crick Institute. Currently, her projects mainly focus on studying BRCA2 and Tel1 related protein-protein interactions involved in DNA damage response pathway, using Cryo-EM and other biophysics methods. 

Dr Luke A. Yates
Research Associate | luke.yates@imperial.ac.uk, +44 07795 570 338, @yates_luke

Luke is a post-doctoral research associate and faculty research fellow (July 2018). Luke completed his D.Phil in Clinical Medicine at Oxford University (Merton College), but his research career has predominantly focused on investigating protein function using structural biology as a means to provide a mechanistic understanding in life and in disease.

Dr Lucas Kuhlen
Research Associate | l.kuhlen@imperial.ac.uk, +44 07482 535 069

Lucas uses cryo-EM to study the structure of BRCA2.

Katie Lister
Research Technician | k.lister@imperial.ac.uk

Alex Carver
PhD student | a.carver19@imperial.ac.uk

Alex completed his MSci at University College London, examining the effect of changes to the cytoskeleton in cancer migration and metastasis. He is currently working on proteins involved in DNA damage repair, specifically those involved in homologous recombination, and how mutations in these key proteins can cause cancer development.

Forson Gao
PhD student | forson.gao15@imperial.ac.uk

Forson is investigating the mechanisms of transcription activation by bacterial enhancer binding proteins in RNA polymerase-σ54 transcription initiation complexes.
The goal of Forson’s project is to understand how interactions between bEBPs, σ54, RNAP and DNA during the ATP hydrolysis cycle facilitates transcription initiation. To do this, we use time-resolved cryo-electron microscopy and a range of biochemical approaches. This work could be used in the future to inform the design of novel antibiotics.

Stephanie Tye
PhD student | s.tye18@imperial.ac.uk

Stephanie is using biochemical and structural approaches to gain mechanistic insights into the tumour suppressor protein BRCA1.  

Bowen Zhang
PhD student | bowen.zhang16@imperial.ac.uk

Bowen’s project is focusing on using X-ray crystallography and cryo-EM to elucidate the role of different enhancer binding proteins in bacterial transcription regulation, which could potentially resolve novel drug target against various pathogens.

Megan Battley 

Research Technician | m.battley@imperial.ac.uk, +44 07565 811 189

Dr Adam Jalal

Research Associate | a.jalal@imperial.ac.uk

Adam earned his PhD from the John Innes Centre where he worked on the ParB/Noc family of CTPases. Currently, Adam's research focuses on chromatin remodelling by the INO80 family of proteins. 

Dr Paul Girvan
Research Associate | p.girvan@imperial.ac.uk

Paul has got experience in single molecule imaging and an interest in unpicking the molecular mechanisms of the cell. Currently, Paul is working on chromatin remodelling complexes.

Dr Dennis Mwangangi
Research Associate | d.mwangangi@imperial.ac.uk

Dennis earned his PhD from the National University of Singapore using structural biology to study actin cytoskeleton. He joined the Wigley lab as a post-doc in 2020, and currently uses electron microscopy to study chromatin remodelling complexes of the INO80 family.

Liz McCormack
Senior Scientific Officer | e.mccormack@imperial.ac.uk, +44 020 7594 8437

Liz completed a BAppSci in Australia and a number of years later a part-time MSc in Biomolecular Organization at Birkbeck College. Liz worked at the Institute of Cancer Research for 14 years in Professor Keith Willison’s Lab before joining the Wigley Lab in 2011.

Valerie Good
Laboratory Manager | v.good@imperial.ac.uk, +44 07843 007 638

Valerie is the manager of the Structural Biology Baculovirus expression facility at Imperial College.

Michael Skehan 
Laboratory Technician | m.skehan@imperial.ac.uk

Michael completed a BSc in Structural Molecular Biology at Birkbeck College (2018) before joining the Wigley Lab as a technician in 2020. Main work involves protein expression and purification relating to chromatin remodelling complexes of the INO80 family.

Kailash Ramlaul
Research Assistant | k.ramlaul@imperial.ac.uk, +44 020 7594 9598, @thekailashkai

Kailash is an Oxford Biochemistry graduate, now a research assistant and part-time PhD student at Imperial. He is using cryo-electron microscopy to structurally characterise protein complexes at the nexus of cell growth signalling.

Dr David Carreno Yugueros
Research Associate | d.carreno-yugueros@imperial.ac.uk

David holds a PhD in Veterinary Medicine from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Currently he is investigating spatial variability within the mammalian gut microbiome during health and inflammatory disease at Riglar’s lab.

Nina Short
PhD student | nina.short15@imperial.ac.uk

Nina joined the Riglar Lab in November 2020 as a PhD student and works on engineering synthetic circuits within bacteria to sense and control the gut microbiome. She has an undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences and a Master's degree in Molecular and Cellular Biosciences from Imperial College London. She has also worked at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health, where she undertook an 8-week studentship investigating the process of mammalian neurulation.

Clare Robinson
PhD student | c.robinson20@imperial.ac.uk

Clare is studying how to engineer bacteria to detect inflammation and spy on the other microbes in the mammalian gut.