About Me

I am an EMBO Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the microbial specialised metabolism group at EAWAG. My research interests lie in synthetic biology for natural product engineering and metagenomic screening to uncover useful enyzmes and biosynthetic pathways. 

I carried out my PhD at Victoria University of Wellington, NZ under the supervision of Prof. David Ackerley. My PhD research developed engineering strategies to modify nonribosomal peptide synthetase (NRPS) systems to produce novel bioactive compounds.

My current research is on the metagenomic discovery of defluorinase enyzmes through activity-based screening; and biosynthetic gene clusters associated with fluorination and fluoride resistance through sequence-based metagenomic screening. This work hopes to uncover new candidates for the degradation of poly fluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS- “forever chemicals”) and identify fluorinated natural product pathways or resistance mechanisms.

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