meet the team

Sophie Palmer is an experienced Senior Research Manager in the infectious disease and global health area. Her experience includes, providing high level guidance, support and recommendation, proactively resolving strategic issues, forward planning and overseeing operations.  Sophie is currently consolidating her experience with an MBA qualification. She has experience in collaborating with multiple University offices and international institutes and is confident in facilitating, developing and implementing strategy with a variety of stakeholders such as eminent international scientists, academic institutes and industry partners. 

Sally Forrest is a Medical Microbiology and Immunology graduate with over 10 years practical experience in both industry and academia laboratories. She is currently working as the lab manager for the Dougan Group, experienced in cell culture including primary, iPSC culture and differentiation and infection models. Sally has fluorescent imaging knowledge which has helped to optimise high throughput imaging on individual bacteria using the Opera Phenix Imaging platform. She has recently worked on study to validate a rapid diagnostic method and analyse the microbiome of bronchial alveolar lavage samples from patients in intensive care. Additionally, she has procured several pieces of key capital equipment and is responsible for the general day-to-day running of the laboratory.

Mailis Maes started as a PhD student in Gordon Dougan’s group in 2018. Her PhD is focused on the intracellular pathogen Salmonella Typhi, and encompasses both the phylogenetics of Salmonella Typhi in Latin America, as well as the behaviour of Salmonella Typhi within macrophages and gallbladder organoids. Mailis has extensive experience in working safely with intracellular and airborne, containment level 3 pathogens from her previous roles in tuberculosis research, including running tuberculosis diagnostics and epidemiology in both rural and urban cities of Venezuela during her time at the Instituto de Biomedicina of Universidad Central de Venezuela, followed by studies looking at human genetic traits and primary immune deficiencies associated with increased susceptibility to tuberculosis while working in Sergey Nejentsev’s group at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Ben Warne qualified from the University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine in 2010. He was awarded a National Institute for Health Research Academic Clinical Fellowship in 2012 and was subsequently appointed as a Specialty Registrar in Infectious Diseases and Internal Medicine at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He is currently working as a Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Cambridge, studying clinical isolates of outbreak strains of Klebsiella pneumoniae. His research is focused on the characterisation of antimicrobial resistance mechanisms in these strains using a combination of genomics approaches and high-content bacterial imaging, under the supervision of Prof Gordon Dougan and Dr Estée Török. Ben is also collaborating with colleagues at Public Health England in a large clinical, epidemiological and genomic study of the nosocomial transmission of influenza in Addenbrooke’s Hospital.

Dr Ellen Higginson joined the University of Cambridge Department of Medicine as a Research Associate in 2018. Her area of expertise is in molecular microbiology and global health, with a focus on gastrointestinal pathogens. Dr Higginson completed her PhD at the University of Melbourne, Australia, before moving to the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB), USA to work on bacterial vaccines. While at UMB she also worked on several global health projects, including stints in Kenya, Chile and Samoa. Dr Higginson moved to Cambridge to work on the Revitalising Informal Settlements and their Environments project, a large interdisciplinary project looking at the impact of improved water sanitation on human and environmental health in informal settlements in Asia and the Pacific. This work is being done in collaboration with the Wellcome Sanger Institute and Monash University, Australia, where Dr Higginson also holds visiting scientist/adjunct research associate positions.

Sushmita Sridhar is a Wellcome Sanger Institute PhD student in the Dougan group. She is interested in the genotypic and phenotypic response of Salmonella Typhimurium to the antimicrobial ciprofloxacin. Her project uses a combination of transcriptomics, high-throughput phenotyping, whole genome sequencing, and microbiological growth assays to elucidate how bacteria survive in and overcome ciprofloxacin stress. She is particularly interested in the evolution of decreased ciprofloxacin susceptibility in invasive non-typhoidal Salmonella Typhimurium ST313 and is using them as a case study to explore how differences in ciprofloxacin susceptibility arise in a highly clonal population.

Dr Ankur Mutreja is an experienced global health scientist who is passionate about science and innovation for controlling and eradicating infectious diseases and AMR. Having worked in both academic research and biotech industry, Ankur brings extensive experience in identifying and translating scientific research into tangible products or services for regulated markets. Ankur leads a research group as a Group Leader - Global Health (Infectious Diseases) at the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge. In addition, he runs several public health projects across Asia and Africa with his network of international collaborators. 

Robert Will is a PhD student in the Dougan & Mutreja groups in the University of Cambridge Department of Medicine and CITIID, as well as a student member of Hughes Hall and visiting research at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. He is funded by Medical Research Council Doctoral Training Program, after graduating with a First Class BSc (Hons) Biology with a Year in Industry from Swansea University. Robert is interested in translational research, focusing on infectious diseases, bacterial evolution and genomics, as well as how communicating science impacts policy and public perception. He is also passionate about widening participation, especially in postgraduate research. His work is primarily focused on computationally analysing large collections of whole genome sequences from bacterial pathogens – in particular Corynebacterium diphtheriae and Vibrio Cholerae – with the aim of improving our understanding of disease evolution across time and space.  Robert represents the Microbiology Society as part of the Champions initiative and was elected to be the Communications Representative of the Early Career Microbiologist's Forum for 2020/21 by its members. He also sits on the MRC DTP committee as a Student Representative.

Fahad Khokhar is a Research Assistant in the Department of Medicine, University of Cambridge, joining Dr. Estée Török’s research group in 2016, with research focussed on screening for multidrug resistant organisms. In 2018 he joined Professor Gordon Dougan’s and Dr Ankur Mutreja’s research groups based at the Cambridge Institute of Therapeutic Immunology and Infectious Diseases and is currently leading a project of developing a molecular diagnostic assay for the detection of enteric pathogens and antibiotic resistance genes. Fahad is working on both the laboratory and bioinformatics sides, with particular specialism in Oxford Nanopore sequencing and data analysis.

Claire Cormie started her career as an Apprentice Lab Technician at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where she was taught techniques in electron and advanced light microscopy after coming from a non-scientific background. Her particular interest is in fluorescence microscopy: She will be managing and operating the Dougan Lab confocal microscope and looks forward to seeing what exciting samples people will bring to her!

Katrien Sutherland is a Research Assistant in the Dougan Group. She gained her Master in Science degree in Microbiology from the University of Glasgow, where she established her interests in the microbiome, host-pathogen interactions and alternative therapies to antibiotics. She spent a year on placement at the University of Western Australia, where she contributed to research on a bacterial therapy to prevent ear infections in young children. Katrien has experience in bacterial and cell culture, immunofluorescence and confocal microscopy. She also enjoys organising and participating in science communication events, as well as the occasional pub quiz.

Dr. Sandra Van Puyvelde is a Senior Research Associate in the Dougan group. She received her MSc and PhD degree in Bioscience Engineering at the University of Leuven (Belgium). In her PhD research, she studied Salmonella Typhimurium gene regulation during biofilm formation. After her PhD she obtained an advanced MSc degree in Statistical Data Analysis at the University of Ghent (Belgium) and worked as a research fellow at the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp studying the genomics of Salmonella causing bloodstream infections in Africa, in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge and Cambridge University where she worked as a visiting researcher since 2015 and 2018 respectively. She joined the Laboratory of Medical Microbiology at UA as an Assistant Professor in 2019, which she combines with a research appointment at the Department of Medicine at the University of Cambridge. In her research, Dr. Sandra Van Puyvelde combines bioinformatics and molecular approaches to understand bacterial infections and their resistance to antibiotics.