Introducing the 2019 cohort of the Herchel Smith Fellows at Cambridge

Alexander Nestor-Bergmann

Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience

Mathematician by training and biologist by aspiration, Alex’s main interests lie in biomechanics. During his PhD, Alex developed mechanical models of tissues to study how external forces can influence cell division. In 2018, he joined Cambridge as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Benedicte Sanson’s group. His current research focuses on understanding how the active mechanical properties of cells can lead to coordinated and unintuitive tissue-level behaviour. A fundamental aspect of this work is extensive interaction between “wet” and “dry” biologists.

Hayley Macpherson

Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics

Hayley was born in Melbourne, Australia, where she completed her PhD at Monash University in 2019. She is interested in investigating the role of Einstein's theory of General Relativity (GR) in the formation of the large-scale galaxy structure of the Universe. During her PhD, she performed cosmological simulations that solve Einstein's equations directly to measure the curvature of spacetime that arises due to inhomogeneous, giga-parsec scale structures. During her time at Cambridge, she will be extending this research to analyse GR effects on our cosmological observations by studying the propagation of light rays through her simulations. Aside from the entire Universe, Hayley loves running, surfing, swimming, and live music. 

Leonie Luginbuehl

Department of Plant Sciences

Leonie did her PhD at the John Innes Centre in Norwich, where she investigated the transcriptional reprogramming of plant roots during the establishment of the symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi. Her work identified a lipid biosynthesis pathway that is upregulated in root cells during the symbiosis and provides mycorrhizal fungi with fatty acids as a major carbon source. In November 2017, Leonie joined the Hibberd group at the University of Cambridge as a postdoctoral scientist. Using photosynthesis as a model, she will combine experimental approaches with mathematical modelling to understand the genetic basis of cell type specific gene expression in rice leaves.

John Chu

Department of Chemistry

John was born and grew up in Hong Kong. After undergraduate study at the University of Hong Kong, he moved to Colorado State University and pursued a Ph.D in Chemistry under the supervision of Professor Tomislav Rovis. His Ph.D research focused on the synthesis of small nitrogen-containing organic molecules. He is currently developing novel chemical reactions for protein modification in the Gaunt Group at the Department of Chemistry.

Wolfram Pönisch

Department of Physiology, Development and Neuroscience

Wolfram grew up in Germany and obtained his M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Leipzig. In 2013, he moved to the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden to obtain his Ph.D. degree under the supervision of Vasily Zaburdaev and Frank Jülicher and supported by the IMPRS CellDevoSys. In Dresden, his research focused on the investigation of bacterial aggregate dynamics with the help of theoretical and numerical models. In summer 2018, Wolfram joined the group of Ewa Paluch at the University College London. In 2019, the lab moved to the University of Cambridge, where he investigates the crosstalk between cell shape and cell fate from a theoreticians point of view.

Georg Krainer

Department of Chemistry

Georg was born in Austria and has a background in the Molecular Biosciences, with a first-class honours degree in Biochemistry and a doctoral degree sum cum laude in Biophysics. Georg’s research activities lie at the interface of biology, chemistry, and physics with a particular focus on understanding the fundamental principles of biomolecular self-assembly and their implications for physiological function and malfunction. As a Herchel Smith Research Fellow in the group of Prof. Tuomas Knowles at the Department of Chemistry and the Centre for Misfolding Diseases, Georg will leverage the combined power of microfluidics and single-molecule detection to explore self-assembly processes in the context of biomolecular condensate formation and protein aggregation involved in neurodegeneration, and their modulation by chaperones and drugs. Outside the lab, Georg enjoys tennis, skiing, classical music, and travelling.

Nicolaus Heuer

Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics

Nicolaus is a pure mathematician working in Geometric Group Theory. He grew up in Frankfurt and did his undergraduate studies at ETH Zurich. He completed his PhD from Oxford in Spring 2019. One question Nicolaus is interested in is: How efficiently can you bound a loop? This seemingly basic question relates to surprisingly many subfields of Mathematics such as Topology, Geometry, Dynamics and Informatics.

Liisa Loog

Department of Genetics

Liisa’s research is focussed the evolution of complex human traits. She is a broadly trained evolutionary geneticist, with her first degree in Biological Anthropology (U. Kent), an MSc in Human Evolution from UCL, and doctoral studies at the Research Laboratory for Archaeological Science at U. Oxford. During her postgraduate studies Liisa developed several analytical methods to quantify past levels of mobility and infer past genetic selection and other evolutionary processes using genetic data from archaeological and fossil specimens (also known as ancient DNA).

In her current position as a Herchel Smith Research Fellow at the Department of Genetics, Liisa will combine ancient DNA and archaeological data with statistical modelling to study the evolution of human height and how it has changed over time in Europe in response to genetic, cultural and environmental factors such as diet and pathogen exposure.

James Matthews

Institute of Astronomy

James grew up in North-East Somerset before studying Physics at the University of Southampton, where he also did his PhD conducting research into the outflowing material around supermassive black holes. This PhD work was under the supervision of Christian Knigge. Since then, he has been a postdoc at the University of Oxford, working with Tony Bell and Katherine Blundell. His research interests relate to particle acceleration, cosmic rays, astrophysical jets and the interaction between supermassive black holes and their host galaxies. He is a mostly theoretical astrophysicist, and uses aspects of plasma physics, radiative transfer and hydrodynamics in his research. Outside of work, James is a keen musician and pubgoer who also enjoys running or a game of football.