News Archive
01/11/2022
A warm welcome to our new group assistant Mr Moritz Wiegand!
30/10/2022
Congratulations to Nia Verdon who has submitted her PhD thesis!
15/10/2022
We are advertising an experimental postdoc position on biophysics of microbial aggregation in the context of the human gut microbiome. Please publicise it! Deadline is 22nd November.
01/10/2022
Check out our student Patrick Sinclair's paper in Physical Review Letters presenting a model for stochastic initiation of bacterial biofilms - and a commentary on it in Nature Reviews Physics.
30/09/2022
Congratulations to Patrick Sinclair who has successfully defended his PhD thesis!
25/08/2022
Here is a great 3 minute video of our PhD student Freya Bull describing her research modelling bacterial infection of a urinary catheter!
25/08/2022
We are searching for a part-time computer systems administrator for our group in Jena. Please contact us if you are interested!
18/08/2022
Welcome to Ariane Zander who has joined us as a technician in our lab!
01/08/2022
We are advertising two PhD studentships! One is experimental, the other is theoretical. Please check them out. Deadline is 25th August.
23/06/2022
A sad farewell, and best wishes, to Patricia Rouland, our group administrator, who is leaving us today.
22/06/2022
We are advertising for a part-time group administrator and a part-time computer systems administrator. Please contact us if you are interested!
22/06/2022
Welcome to Pavithirah, a student who just graduated from IISER Pune. She plans to collaborate with us remotely on modelling microbial colony morphology.
20/06/2022
Check out the advert for a junior research group leader in mechanistic modelling of microbial interactions, within the Microverse cluster in Jena! Deadline 5th July.
01/06/2022
Welcome to Lisa Karnbach who has joined as a technician in our lab! We are also delighted to "re-welcome" Vijay Srinivasan who has moved to Jena from our group in Edinburgh!
24/05/2022
Please check out the workshop on Microbial Communities: Current Approaches and Open Challenges that we are co-organising at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, UK, October 14-18 2022!
09/05/2022
We are delighted to welcome Marco Mauri who has moved from our group in Edinburgh to our group in Jena!
03/05/2022
Check out the advert for a junior research group leader in mechanistic modelling of microbial interactions, within the Microverse cluster in Jena!
01/05/2022
Welcome to Ofelia Popescu who starts her SOFI CDT project supervised by Simon Titmuss, on which we will collaborate!
30/04/2022
Congratulations to Freya Bull, who has got through to the University-wide finals for the 3 minute thesis competition! Here is a video of her talking about her work on modelling catheter-associated urinary tract infections.
30/03/2022
Check out our new preprints on bioRxiv! Ellen Young and Gavin Melaugh's paper explains how structural changes in simulations of growing biofilms can arise from an interface pinning transition. Patrick Sinclair, Chris Brackley and Martin Carballo Pacheco present a simple model for stochastic biofilm initiation.
13/03/2022
Rosalind is honoured to have been awarded an Esther Hoffman Beller lectureship to speak (online) at the APS March meeting, at the Delbrück symposium in honour of Terry Hwa, who won the Delbrück Prize.
13/01/2022
A warm welcome to new PhD student Sheila Hoshyaripour, who will work with us on modelling of peptidoglycan!
12/11/2021
In the past 2 weeks we have welcomed two new group members! Patricia Rouland is the new administrator of our group in Jena and Anne Busch is our new lab manager.
01/10/2021
I'm happy to announce that I have started a new job as Professor of Theoretical Microbial Ecology at the University of Jena! It is part of the excellence cluster "Balance of the Microverse" and I am excited about the opportunities for new research and collaborations! I will still be affiliated with the University of Edinburgh as well!
14/01/2021
Exciting news: we are starting a Population Dynamics Journal Club! It's open to all. Check out the website! Thanks to Marco Mauri for doing a great job of organising this.
14/01/2021
Check out our new paper showing how to count individual bacteria growing in hundreds of microfluidic droplets! It has just appeared on BioRxiv. Congratulations to Dan Taylor and Nia Verdon on their great work.
27/11/2020
Congratulations to Freya Bull who has won the School prize for best 3rd year PhD student poster!
01/10/2020
Welcome to new postdoc Vijay Srinivasan! He will teach us a lot about mycobacterial cell biology and population dynamics!
22/09/2020
Congratulations to Ellen Young, who has passed her PhD viva!
15/09/2020
Welcome to our two new MPhys projects students Jamie McLauchlan and Balagardash Bashirov!
01/05/2020
Welcome to new postdoc Marco Mauri! He will be developing models for bacterial peptidoglycan synthesis and the action of cell-wall targeting antibiotic.
23/04/2020
Rebecca Brouwers' paper on the stability of beta-lactam antibiotics in bacterial growth media has just been posted on biorxiv - you can read it here!
20/04/2020
Our paper on detection of bacteria by multivalent DNA binding has appeared in PNAS! Congratulations to the whole multinational team that was involved, and especially to first author Tine Curk. You can also read this press release on our department website!
19/04/2020
Welcome to my new PhD student Laura Confalonieri! Laura is a SOFI2 CDT student who will work with me and Susana Direito on catheter-associated biofilms, in collaboration with Kimal Plc.
04/03/2020
I'm honoured to have been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh!
04/03/2020
I and my clinical collaborators have just had a paper, "Staff and patient perceptions of a community urinary catheter service" accepted by the International Journal of Urological Nursing! Our student Freya Oswald interviewed nursing staff and patients with urinary catheters and compared their perceptions of having a urinary catheter. As a physicist I learned a lot from this project!
02/03/2020
I'm happy to be back from maternity leave!
10/10/2019
Take a look at our new manuscript "A roadblock-and-kill model explains the dynamical response to the DNA targeting antibiotic ciprofloxacin" that just appeared on Bioarxiv. Congratulations especially to lead author Nikola Ojkic!
16/09/2019
Congratulations to Gavin Melaugh, whose paper "a simulation study of aggregation mediated by production of cohesive molecules" has just been accepted by Soft Matter!
03/09/2019
We are advertising two postdoc positions! An EPSRC-funded position on modeling AMR bacteria has closing date 6 September, and an ERC-funded position (expt, simulation or theory) on the physics of AMR has closing date 30 September.
18/06/2019
Congratulations to Rebecca Brouwers, who has just passed her PhD viva!
14/06/2019
Cat Mills, I and Richard Blythe have just had a paper accepted by Theoretical Ecology! It's called "Resource spectrum engineering by specialist species can shift the specialist-generalist balance".
12/06/2019
I'm excited to be part of a team that has been awarded an EPSRC "Building Collaboration at the Physics of Life Interface" grant. This involves researchers from Sheffield, Cambridge, Newcastle and Edinburgh and will look at how antibiotic-resistant bacteria differ from sensitive ones. You can read more here.
11/06/2019
Congratulations to Dan Taylor, who has just passed his PhD viva!
22/04/2019
Congratulations to Rebecca Brouwers, who has just submitted her PhD thesis!
25/03/2019
Patrick Sinclair, Martin Carballo and my paper "Growth-dependent drug susceptibility can prevent or enhance spatial expansion of a bacterial population" has just been accepted for publication in Physical Biology!
05/03/2019
Congratulations to Dan Taylor, who has just submitted his PhD thesis!
04/03/2019
Welcome to senior honours project student Calum Brown, who will work with me and Elin Lilja on biofilm experiments.
08/02/2019
Our new liquid handling robot is up and running! We are excited about starting to use it in our experiments!
08/02/2019
Susana Direito and I are excited to start our new biofilm growth project with Kimal PLC, funded by an NBIC proof of concept grant!
15/01/2019
Welcome to new senior honours project students Ross Slater and Kate Keddie! Ross will be modelling bacterial aggregation and Kate will be growing biofilms!
14/11/2018
Check out the review article "Bacterial growth: a statistical physicist's guide", by myself and Bartek Waclaw, that has just appeared in Reports on Progress in Physics!
03/09/2018
Welcome to new PhD student Freya Bull!
23/07/2018
Welcome to summer student Kate Keddie, who will be working with us on growing biofilms in our new reactor!
03/07/2018
Welcome to undergrad student Omar Shabana, who will be working in the lab over the summer with postdoc Sharareh!
04/05/2018
Welcome to Yusong Tian, who will be doing a summer project with us on E. coli colony growth.
30/04/2018
Welcome to new SOFI CDT PhD student Nia Verdon! She will be working with me and Simon Titmuss on growing bacteria in droplets.
26/02/2018
Please check out the website for our upcoming conference on "Stochastic Models of evolving populations: from bacteria to cancer". Registration is now open, click here.
15/01/2018
I gave my inaugural lecture as Professor of Biological Physics. It was titled "Antimicrobial resistance: how can a physicist help?" and you can see it here!
15/01/2018
Welcome to Yusong Tian! She is doing her seminor honours project with me and Nikola Ojkic on how bacteria form colonies.
15/11/2017
Our paper "Predicting the dynamics of bacterial growth inhibition by ribosome-targeting antibiotics" has appeared in Physical Biology in the Special Issue on the physics of antimicrobial resistance!
12/11/2017
Congratulations to our postdoc Susana Direito, who has been awarded a University of Edinburgh EPSRC Impact Acceleration Account award for a collaborative project with AMT technologies!
06/10/2017
Our paper, together with my former student Tim Bush and collaborators Jef Huisman and Gerard Muijzer in Amsterdam, has appeared in Nature Communications. It shows how microbes can cause oxic-anoxic regime shifts in freshwater lakes.
26/09/2017
Welcome to our MPhys project student David Norman who will work with me and Ellen Young on simulations of biofilm structure!
04/09/2017
Congratulations to our postdoc Gavin Melaugh who has become father to a little girl!
01/09/2017
Welcome to our new PhD student Patrick Sinclair! He will be working with us in partnership with Akzo Nobel to understand how gradients of antimicrobials affect biofilm growth and structure.
30/08/2017
Many thanks to our summer student Elizabeth Tatham, who did a great job working with us on cell wall targeting antibiotics! Good luck to her in her next post at the University of Sheffield!
30/07/2017
Our paper in collaboration with Jef Huisman and Gerard Muijzer's group on how feedbacks between biogeochemical processes and microbial community dynamics can lead to oxic-anoxic regime shifts is about to appear in Nature Communications!
31/07/2017
Thanks to everyone who participated in our workshop "Quantitative approaches to antimicrobial resistance" - and thanks to IOP, EBSA and the EPSRC Physics of Life Network for sponsorship!
20/07/2017
Our workshop "Quantitative approaches to antimicrobial resistance" starts today! http://amr2017.iopconfs.org/home
19/07/2017
Our paper on dynamical response to ribosome-targeting antibiotics has been accepted in Physical Biology!
14/07/2017
Thanks to summer student Lauren Clark who did a great job looking at spatial structure development in bacterial colonies!
30/05/2017
Please register for our 2-day workshop "Quantitative approaches to antimicrobial resistance", which will be held in Edinburgh 20-21 July. It is a satellite to the IUPAB EBSA Biophysics meeting. Abstract deadline is 7th June! http://amr2017.iopconfs.org/home
22/05/2017
Welcome back to Elizabeth Tatham and welcome to Lauren Clark, both of whom will be doing projects with us over the summer.
23/01/2017
Welcome to Elizabeth Tatham who will be doing an undergrad research project with us this semester!
01/12/2016
Welcome to new postdoc Martin Carballo Pacheco! He will be doing theory/simulation work with me and Bartek Waclaw on evolution of antibiotic resistance.
14/11/2016
Welcome to new postdoc Nikola Ojkic! He will work with me and Bartek Waclaw on models for antibiotic action and resistance evolution.
04/11/2016
A sad farewell to Diarmuid Lloyd, after many years in our department as an undergraduate, PhD student and postdoc. We wish him well in his future career!
17/10/2016
Welcome to new postdoc Sharareh Tavaddod! She will be working with me and Bartek Waclaw on microscopy experiments.
03/10/2016
Welcome to new postdoc Elin Lilja! She will be working with me and Bartek Waclaw on evolution experiments.
30/09/2016
A sad farewell to Tim Bush who has been working with us as a postdoc for the past 6 months. He will be starting a new career as a data scientist. We wish him good luck!
04/09/2016
Welcome to postdoc Susana Direito! She will be working with Bartek Waclaw and me on antibiotic gradient experiments.
02/09/2016
A sad farewell to Steve Court who has been doing a postdoc with us and will be starting a new career in medical physics. We wish him good luck!
01/09/2016
Welcome to new PhD student Ellen Young! She will be working on simulations of bacterial biofilms.
04/07/2016
Congratulations to Dan Taylor who won a prize for best poster at the SOFI-CDT showcase in Leeds!
27/06/2016
Nick Cogan et al have written a commentary on our recent mBio paper on the role of aggregates in bacterial biofilm formation!
30/05/2016
We are advertising 4 ERC-funded postdoc positions in the physics of antimicrobial resistance! Follow this link for more information. We are looking for experimentalists, theorists and simulators.The closing date is 1st July.
30/05/2016
Welcome to Giulia Bergamaschi who will work with us for 12 weeks over the summer looking at colony formation in Pseudomonas aeruginosa.
23/05/2016
Congratulations to Cat Mills who has successfully defended her PhD thesis "Competition between specialist and generalist species in computational and experimental model ecosystems"!
02/05/2016
Welcome back to Tim Bush, a former PhD student who has come back from his postdoc in Amsterdam to spend a few months working with us!
12/04/2016
Congratulations to Cat Mills who has just submitted her PhD thesis "Competition between specialist and generalist species in computational and experimental model ecosystems"!
30/03/2016
Our review paper "Challenges in microbial ecology: building predictive understanding of community function and dynamics" from our programme on Understanding Microbial Communities at the Isaac Newton Institute in 2014, appeared today in ISME Journal!
22/03/2016
Our paper "The role of multicellular aggregates in biofilm formation" by our HFSP collaborative team, with Kasper Kragh, Jaime Hutchison and Gavin Melaugh as joint first authors, has appeared in mBio!
09/03/2016
Our paper "Shaping the growth behaviour of biofilms initiated from bacterial aggregates", by our HFSP collaborative team, with Gavin Melaugh as first author, appears today in Plos One!
23/02/2016
Our paper "The role of multicellular aggregates in biofilm formation" by our HFSP collaborative team, with Kasper Kragh, Jaime Hutchison and Gavin Melaugh as joint first authors, has been accepted in mBio.
22/02/2016
A collaborative review paper "Challenges in microbial ecology: building predictive understanding of community function and dynamics" which has emerged from our programme on Understanding Microbial Communities at the Isaac Newton Insitute in Cambridge in 2014, has been accepted for publication in ISME Journal. Thanks especially to Stefanie Widder for coordinating the writing of it!
18/02/2016
Our paper "Shaping the growth behaviour of bacterial aggregates in biofilms", by our HFSP collaborative team, with Gavin Melaugh as first author, has been accepted in Plos One.
15/12/2015
I just heard that I have been awarded an ERC consolidator grant to investigate the link between spatial structure in bacterial populations and the emergence of antibiotic resistance!
03/11/2015
Bartek Waclaw and I have agreed to co-organize a special issue of Physical Biology on antimicrobial resistance on a rolling timescale in 2016. If you might have a paper to submit please get in touch with us.
03/11/2015
Last week we had a great Royal Society International Scientific Seminar at Chicheley Hall on "Antimicrobial resistance: how can physicists help?". Many thanks to everyone who participated.
10/10/2015
Register now for the upcoming IOP and Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics Topical Meeting "Physical Principles of Biological and Active Systems"!
30/09/2015
Steve Court's paper on glycolysis appears in Nature Communications
14/09/2015
Welcome to my new PhD student Rebecca Brouwers!
01/09/2015
Diarmuid Lloyd's paper on bacterial competition for space appears in J. R. Soc. Interface
01/08/2015
Tim Bush's paper on biogeochemical cycles appears in Biogeosciences
01/11/2022
A warm welcome to our new group assistant Mr Moritz Wiegand!
30/10/2022
Congratulations to Nia Verdon who has submitted her PhD thesis!
15/10/2022
We are advertising an experimental postdoc position on biophysics of microbial aggregation in the context of the human gut microbiome. Please publicise it! Deadline is 22nd November.
01/10/2022
Check out our student Patrick Sinclair's paper in Physical Review Letters presenting a model for stochastic initiation of bacterial biofilms - and a commentary on it in Nature Reviews Physics.
30/09/2022
Congratulations to Patrick Sinclair who has successfully defended his PhD thesis!