Natalie holds a BA in French, Russian and Spanish from the University of Birmingham. She went on to study Food Policy at City, University of London, graduating with an MSc in 2018. During her Master’s degree, Natalie researched participatory social policy and public engagement in the context of food poverty. Natalie also has a year’s experience working as a buyer in the food industry.

Miron started his doctoral studies at Newcastle University in September 2019 in the group of Dr Yulia Yuzenkova.

In his project, he aims to observe, understand and reproduce the mechanisms by which cells keep time. Cyanobacteria Synechococcus elongatus are essential components of planetary ecosystems, providing essential molecules through photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation. A strong biological clock, termed circadian rhythm, controls the timing of all involved processes. Work is currently carried out to provide insight into the mechanisms that allow such a rhythm to function.

David started his PhD at Newcastle University in September 2019 in the School of Computing as part of the ICOS group. He is working on automation practices in synthetic biology, as well as studying the induced stress response in Bacillus subtilis when a ‘metabolic load’ is created as a result of introducing synthetic components to the organism.

Neil started his PhD in April 2019 looking at DNA computing and its applications within industry.

Jordan started studying a PhD in Machine Learning for Synthetic Biology in April 2019 under the supervision of Dr Jaume Bacardit. Fields of interest include machine learning, deep learning and the computational techniques applied to real and complex biological problems. In the Portabolomics project, Jordan is currently investigating Deep Learning Techniques for Nucleic Acid Origami. This is to drive forward understanding and through data create new knowledge regarding the Nucleic Acid Origami process. Jordan believes the applications of machine learning and synthetic biology will have a large impact across several research areas, economic sectors and has high societal value.

With the special interest in designing machine learning methods and applying them to tackle real problems, Yiming stared her PhD in September of 2018 as part of the Portabolomics project. She aims to extract new biological knowledge, e.g identify the biomarkers and infer the networks on massive biological data including but not limited to transcriptomics, proteinomics, images. This will help biologist to understand the complex molecular processes that occur in a cell from the point view of data.