People
Jason King, Principal Investigator
After my degree in Medical Biochemistry, I went on to do an an MPhil(Res) in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Birmingham in 2000. I then completed a PhD in Adrian Harwood's lab; first at the LMCB in London, then Cardiff University. There I studied how lithium treatment, which is still widely prescirbed for bipolar disorder, affects cellular signalling.
I subsequently did a 6-year postdoc in Robert Insall's lab at the CR-UK Beatson Institute in Glasgow. There, after initially working on cell migration and division I was able to develop my interests in autophagy and trafficking.
In 2013 I was awarded a Vice-Chancellors Advanced Fellowship by the University of Sheffield to establish an independent research group, which was followed by a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, awarded in 2015.
Postdocs
Joe Tyler
Joe loves actin. He joined us in 2022, on a BBSRC grant aiming to understand how cells generate the ring of protrusion that shapes macropinocytic cups.
Dan Stark
Dan is on a joint BBSRC/NSF project with Liz Ballou (Exeter) and Jessie Uehling (Oregon) trying to understand how bacterial/fungal endosymbioses evolve, affect their cell biology and enable them to evade predators, such as amoebae, in the environment.
Zhou Zhu
Zhou is funded by the Royal Society and is helping us set up new systems to extend our work on macropinocytosis into mammalian cells.
PhD students
Ana Guevara Cerdan
Meg Poxon
Ilona Wilson
Lab Alumni
James Vines joined us in 2018, and was also funded by the Royal Society. He is trying to understand how macropinosome and phagosome maturation is regulated, and how this affects the survival of bacteria after engulfment.
George Starling was a Royal Society funded student, who joined us in 2015. She studied a previously uncharacterised protein that regulates microtubule dynamics and ultimately all lysosomal degradation pathways. She is currently a postdoc at the Crick.
Chris Munn was jointly supervised with Laura Swan at the University of Liverpool and funded by the MRC DiMEN doctoral training programme. He exploited Dictyostelium as a model system to understand the roles of the protein OCRL – the causative gene mutated in Lowe Syndrome, and a key regulator of cellular trafficking pathways.
Ben Phillips was a BBSRC-funded PhD student, who joined the lab in 2014. He was investigating how cells induce autophagy in response to mechanical stress, and the relevance of this to human physiology.
Cat Buckley started with Ben, when the lab was just beginning. She worked on how PIKfyve regulates phagosome and macropinosome maturation, as well as discovering how small GTPases are regulated during engulfment. She is now a Scientific Liason officer with AstraZeneca.
Zamzam Mahamoud was with us for a year, investigating how fungal natural products affect the ability of amoebae to feed – interactions that may be important both environmentally and during the evolution of fungal pathogenicity.