Stephen is a molecular and computational biologist with broad interests in understanding genetic change over time.
Stephen is currently a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (Group Leader) in the Parasites and Microbes Programme at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the UK. His Fellowship, which started in September 2020, is supported by UKRI and The Wellcome Trust.
Prior to this, Stephen was a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow from 2015-2020 in the Parasite Genomics group led by Matt Berriman at the Sanger Institute. During this time, Stephen focused on developing genetic resources to understand anthelmintic resistance in two economically important pathogens of small ruminants, Haemonchus contortus and Teladorsagia circumcincta. This work led to the assembly of a chromosome-scale genome for H. contortus and identification of QTL and causal loci for benzimidazole, levamisole and ivermectin resistance.
Stephen’s first postdoctoral postion was in the Nematode Functional Genomics group led by Warwick Grant at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Here, Stephen
focused on the genetic analysis of sub-optimal responses by Onchocerca volvulus to ivermectin. This work led to the first genome-wide comparative analysis between “good”
and “poor” responders in Ghana and Cameroon, revealing multiple but distinct genetic signatures of selection differentiating response types.
Stephen received his PhD in Genetics at La Trobe University in 2011.
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