Dr Taylor successfully defended her PhD in 2020 and is now postdoc-ing as a Bioinformatician at the University of Cardiff, Wales.  She completed her degree in Genetics and Cell Biology in DCU in 2016.

Alysha began her PhD in the Computational and Molecular Evolutionary Biology Group in Leeds in October 2016, after being awarded a Leeds Anniversary Research Scholarship. Alysha’s PhD was a collaboration between Dr. Mary O’Connell (now based at Uni of Nottingham) and Dr. Niamh Forde in the Faculty of Medicine and Health (based at Uni of Leeds) – and spanned both computational (dry-bench) and molecular (wet-bench) skills. Her project aimed to predict changes in the function of specific proteins and also changes in non-coding regulatory elements that coincided with the emergence of the mammal placenta. Alysha (Ali) used large-scale analyses to study mammal genomes, identified targets (coding and non-coding) and then carried out functional assays on those targets. Her work has contributed to a number of papers in preparation, and our recent paper on CAPG. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32619075/

Before joining our group,  Ali obtained an internship in the Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases, carrying out a project investigating novel tubulin dynamics under specific transfection conditions. During her final year research project in the Infection Genomics group in DCU, Ireland, she further improved the assembly of a tropical parasite Leishmania naiffi. Work from Ali’s final year project has been incorporated into the following publication: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/4/172212 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/12/14/233148