I'm a postdoctoral research associate at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. I work for Jeff Kelly, studying E. coli's proteostasis network with Evan Powers. Evan has built a computer model of that describes how all of the chaperones and proteases interact, called FoldEco, and I'm helping to develop the model and test its predictions in cells.

I used to work at the Astbury Centre for Structural and Molecular Biology in Leeds. I worked for Professor Sheena Radford, with a lovely bunch of colleagues.

My main bit of work was looking at the relationship between function and stability of the bacterial immunity protein Im7, which was published in Molecular Cell, hurrah! It's free to download if you're interested, thanks to The Wellcome Trust. Plus there's a lovely preview in the same issue.

I did my PhD at the University of Sheffield, working for Jon Waltho and Rosie Staniforth, doing research into the mechanisms which underly amyloidosis, a process involved in several major neurodegenerative diseases. More specifically, I've mapped the structure of the amyloid fibrils formed by stefin B, a member of the cystatin superfamily. The NMR group's webpages.

I've tried to write a description of what I did for my PhD project that's intelligible to people who aren't structural biologists. And a slightly more in-depth introduction to what I did in Leeds and am continuing to do at Scripps, which is protein folding. I've tried to link to places that will explain some of the concepts involved.

There's an animation of the domain swapping process (~220k gif) - created with the help of the Yale Morph Server. It's pretty meaningless unless you know what it is, but hey, that's life... I've also written a description of how I made it, along with advice on making your own. It's a bit out of date now, but you never know, one day I may write a new one.

Oh, and the page title is from xkcd. Which is ace.