Molecular phylogenetics

Postdoctoral Researcher

Pathogen genomics

I am a versatile postdoctoral researcher with extensive experience in Mycobacterial genomics. The primary focus of my research is investigating the transmission dynamics of various bacterial species including Mycobacterium bovis in a multi-host system and non-tuberculous Mycobacteria in a hospital setting.  Alongside my research I also have an interest in developing reproducible bioinformatics workflows using state of the art tools such as Nextflow.

Evolutionary biologist interested in the origins of evolutionary novelty and molecular basis of adaptation.

I took my Masters' in Computational Biology at the University of York and then my PhD in Evolutionary Biology at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory-European Bioinformatics Institute, supervised jointly by Nick Goldman and Christophe Dessimoz.

In August 2016, I joined the Transmissible Cancer Group in the Department of Veterinary Medicine, headed by Elizabeth Murchison

Nathanael is interested in evolutionary novelty, particularly in complex biochemical traits. He investigates the contribution of various sources of variation, especially gene duplication, to evolutionary innovations, using phylogenetics, comparative genomics and gene expression analysis. He is particularly interested in synthesising systems biology and co-expression network techniques to understand how complex traits evolve. He is also interested in core phylogenetic theory, including gene tree conflict, phylogenetic information content, and non-homogeneous evolutionary models. 

Scientist in Molecular Evolution at European Bioinformatics Institute