Current members
Roly Megaw
Clinical Lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and Honorary Consultant at NHS Lothian. Roly's research and clinical interests lie with the inherited retinal dystrophies, both in terms of understanding disease mechanisms and identifying novel therapeutics. He is a Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Fellow.
Fay Newton
Coming to us from Andy Jarman’s lab, where Fay has been modelling human ciliopathies and auditory defects in fly, we are thrilled she has decided to jump up the evolutionary tree to continue to her work on the role of specialized cilia in mammalian neurons. She is focusing on the role and regulation of actin dynamics in mouse photoreceptor disc formation and degeneration in retinitis pigmentosa models.
Patricia Yeyati
Senior Investigator Scientist. Developing novel cilial biosensors and cilia specific proximity labeling animal models to investigate what happens to the ever-growing different types of cilia that are being uncovered during development and how are they affected in disease? What are the compositional changes on which these different types of cilia are built upon? Could we use this information to modulate the outcome of genetic diseases?
Peter Tennant
Postdoctoral fellow. His current research focuses on developing new CRISPR-based therapies for rare genetic diseases, with an emphasis on primary ciliary dyskinesia (PCD). The ability of CRISPR to selectively and efficiently target any gene of our choosing has for the first time opened up the possibility of a truly personalised approach to treating genetic diseases.
Daniel Dodd
As a postdoc in the lab, Dan focuses on understanding the complex assembly of axonemal dynein proteins, the machines responsible for cilia movement. He also works on improving the ability of CRISPR/Cas9 editing technology to correct mutations in DNA for therapy.
Emma Hall
Post-doctoral scientist. She is fascinated by how cilia detect and integrate diverse developmental signalling pathways. She is studying how ciliary dynamics are regulated at the whole organism level, currently by trying to understand how centriolar satellites detect extracellular signals and influence ciliogenesis.
Fraser McPhie
After an extraordinary honours project in the lab, we had nabbed Fraser as research assistant extraordinaire. Then as one of our 4 year HGU PhD pandemic students, Dr McPhie defended his thesis on tubulins and ciliopathies in November 2023! Fraser will be staying with us a bit longer to finish off his paper on an endogenously tagged tubulin which lets us monitor endogenous isotype contributions into different cellular MT lattices across tissues and development with single molecule resolution before starting a postdoc in the US.
Sophie Nakford
Joining us in January 2021, Sophie has started her PhD work on novel tools for therapeutic genome editing for rare genetic diseases like the ciliopathies. As an Australian, she was awarded an Edinburgh Global Research Scholarship and a Principal’s Career Development Scholarship to join us! We are still to get her a real work photo…
Linda Nguyen
Linda joins us September 2021 as a Precision Medicine PhD candidate shared between Mill lab, Roly Megaw and Catalina Vallejos. She will be bridging wet lab discovery and dry lab data wrangling in her PhD studying why photoreceptors die in different models of retinitis pigmentosa (RP)!
Jana Muronova
Dr Jana Muronova join the team from her PhD work with Prof Pierre Ray at Université Grenoble Alpes, FR where she studied mechanisms of male infertility, centriole biogenesis and spermiogenesis in human patients and mouse models. Jana joins our ERC Cilia Circuits team working understanding how cells control scaling of different cilia products involving post-transcriptional control during multiciliogenesis.
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Chloe Brotherton
After an undergrad from University of Glasgow, Chloe joins us as a PhD candidate working on RPGR and vision loss on a studentship funded by RetinaUK/Macular Society under Dr Roly Megaw. She is aiming to understand the the role of RPGR in connecting cilium maintenance, cytoskeletal regulation and disc formation, with a particular focus on its role in cones.
Marina Arbi
Marina had a very succesful career in Zoi Lygerou's lab, at the Medical School of the University of Patras, Greece. She has done very elegant work to understand the role of the cell cycle-related proteins Geminin, GemC1 and McIdas in multiciliogenesis and centriole biology using advanced imaging, proteomics, biochemistry and mouse models. She joins us for the MRC NMGN postdoc to develop preclinical models of ciliopathies for fast-tracking therapeutics.