I have a diverse research background, having published on the biomechanics of bird flight, the evolution of influenza surface proteins, and the biogeography of the Indo-Pacific region.
I am currently a Research and Development Fellow at the UK Government’s Department for the Environment, Farming, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA), for which I am posted at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, working on the project, ‘Innovative Data Science for the Exploration of Biodiversity Darkspots’ (the foundations of which can be found in this paper).
I maintain an independent research programme on biodiversity discovery and biogeographical research, particularly on the island of New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island and one of the least explored terrestrial regions on the planet. The flagship project of this research is Expedition Cyclops, a scientific research collaboration between the University of Oxford, the Papuan NGO Yappenda, Indonesian universities, and Indonesian government. Our research ‘rediscovered’ Attenborough's long-beaked echidna, a species of egg-laying mammal not seen by science for 62 years (read BBC article here and read research paper here). From the project we have a large dataset of invertebrate, reptile, and amphibian specimens -- including many new species – which together with newly-collected rock samples will inform biogeographical studies of New Guinea’s montane biodiversity. We also have 38,000 camera-trap images that form the basis of developing automated image classification algorithms for New Guinea’s terrestrial vertebrate fauna.
During my DPhil, I sought to understand how albatrosses and their relatives can fly hundreds of miles without flapping, and how falcons and hawks can so precisely intercept their prey. For the former, I devised a new way to calculate how effectively any flyer – whether animal or vehicle – is harvesting energy from the wind (see main research output here). For the latter, I employed equations devised by homing missile engineers to test how birds-of-prey implement their pursuit of targets (see main research output here).
From my DPhil research, I made a small jump to investigating influenza surface protein evolution, characterising the sequence variability of putative antigens of haemagglutinin proteins across different influenza subtypes and strains. This work forms part of a project to exploit antigens of limited variability for the design of a ‘universal’ flu vaccine (main research output here).
I am a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Biology, and I am an Associate Member of Merton College, Oxford.
