Oliver Crook

Fellowship: MRC Career Development Award

Title of the research: Interrogating host-parasite interaction with multiscale proteomics

About the research

The malaria parasite causes a huge disease burden to the human population and has done so by finding a perfect home in the human red blood cell. How this parasite makes a home in these cells however is not fully understood. We employ experimental and computational approaches to better understand the changing architecture of infected red-blood cells.

How will this fellowship help my career progression?

My research has always involved working closely with experimentalists, having done my PhD in a primarily experimental group. The MRC Career Development Award will allow me to start a hybrid experimental-computational group exploiting the benefits of truly working at the interface.

The support the University provides

The research support team was key to providing advice on which fellowships to target, the financial aspects of the application and organizing sessions to prepare for the interview. The university also connects early career fellows to share tips

Background

After an MMath degree at Warwick (2012-2016), I joined the Wellcome Trust Mathematical Genomics CDT at Cambridge culminating in a PhD in Biochemistry supervised by Kathryn Lilley, Laurent Gatto and Paul Kirk. I won the Peter Landshoff prize for outstanding computational biology PhD. I was also awarded the Fisher memorial trust’s young biometrician award for one of my PhD papers. I was then a research associate in the Oxford Department of Statistics working with Charlotte Deane and subsequently Florence Nightingale Fellow. I was briefly seconded to the UK Government leading a protein design group at the AI Safety Institute and was recently awarded an MRC Career Development Award to start my research group in the Kavli Institute. I continue as a Todd-Bird Junior Research Fellow at New College until 2027.