Research

Living things strike a balance between robustness and flexibility. To survive, living systems have to be robust against perturbations from their environment, and against mutation, as most mutations are deleterious. Simultaneously, for life to evolve and adapt to its changing environment, it must be capable of changing in response to mutation or environmental change. I find the balance between these seemingly contradictory things very beautiful. I research how organisms achieve this balance, and how it arises in evolution.

Embryos and Mathematics

Embryos, besides being interesting in their own right, exhibit all of the above properties, and hold an important place within evolutionary biology. Embryos translate genetic and environmental information into the structures and colours that make an organism’s body. The way in which the embryo does this has to buffer against noise, but also be capable of changing in evolution to make new structures and patterns.

It is largely unknown how this balance is achieved, but it is thought to be an emergent property of the complex dynamics of development. In my research I use a combination of mathematics and experiments to understand these dynamics.

Flies and Cichlids 🪰🐠

As of October 2025 I am working in Dr Erik Clark’s group in the Department of Genetics at the University of Cambridge. Here I am studying the embryos of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, to understand how embryos buffer development against natural variation in the size of the egg. Over the course of this project I hope to work on other diptera, such as the psychodid Clogmia albipunctata, the mosquito Anopheles gambiae, and other interesting species in the Drosophila genus.

Before moving to Cambridge I was a DPhil student at the University of Oxford studying the embryonic development of the Lake Malawi cichlids Astatotilapia calliptera and Rhamphochromis sp. ‘chilingali’, supervised by Dr Berta Verd and Prof Ruth Baker. Here I used experiments in these fish and modelling their development to understand why vertebral number is capable of evolving rapidly.