Wren Lab - Staff

Dr Nick Dorrell originally trained as a pharmacist, obtaining a BPharm degree from the University of Bath in 1988 and completing his pre-registration training at King's College Hospital in 1989. After two years working in hospital pharmacy, he returned to Bath to study DNA repair in Escherichia coli, completing his PhD in 1993. He joined Dr Brendan Wren's research group at St Bartholomew's Hospital in 1994, and worked on many different aspects of bacterial pathogenicity in Brucella species, Yersinia species and Helicobacter pylori. He joined the LSHTM in 1999 and is continuing to study bacterial pathogenicity in both H. pylori and Campylobacter jejuni. Current research interests include the functional analysis of the N-linked glycosylation system in C. jejuni and the innate immune response to C. jejuni infection.

Gill Thacker joined the Molecular Pathogen Biology Unit in April 2003 to work on Campylobacter mutagenesis as part of a BBSRC £1 million funded tricentre consortium (LSHTM, Universities of Leicester and Birmingham) to exploit genome information by mutating and DNA tagging all 1654 predicted genes in the Campylobacter jejuni genome. Gill will be working with Dr Andrey Karlyshev and Professor Brendan Wren.

Jon Cuccui is currently a research assistant and a part-time research degree student on a DSTL funded project entitled 'Development of a refined signature tagged mutagenesis strategy for the identification of novel virulence determinants and vaccine candidates in Burkholderia pseudomallei.'

Sarah Howard gained a Bachelors degree in Biological Sciences with Virology at Warwick University and then worked at GlaxoSmithkline as a Research scientist in DNA vaccine development for two years. In October 2002 she joined PMBU as a PhD student working on a research project concerning the genotypic and phenotypic comparison of virulent Yersinia enterocolitica from animals and humans.

Ozan Gundogdu is currently involved in multiple microarray data analysis projects and is actively involved in using and enhancing the School's microarray/bioinformatics software tools. In addition to this, he is involved in constructing microsimulations using Java programming. He is also responsible for creating and running the Genome Resource Facility (GRF) website.

Dr Richard Stabler is developing a pan-pathogen surveillance microarray. Other interests included microarray analysis of C.difficile.

Pippa Strong gained a bachelors degree in Biology from the University of Durham. She joined LSHTM in 2004 and is currently working as a research assistant and part-time research degree student investigating putative virulence determinants in Yersinia pseudotuberculosis.