Welcome!
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Pedicord Lab, University of Cambridge, working at the intersection of computational metagenomics and gut-brain biology. My research programme centres on developing and deploying population-scale shotgun metagenomics pipelines — including reference database construction and rigorous benchmarking — to profile under-characterised components of the gut microbiome and link them to neurological and behavioural phenotypes.
I completed my PhD in Genetics in 2024 at the National Institute of Genetics, Japan, under the supervision of Dr. Tsuyoshi Koide. My doctoral research investigated how the gut microbiome contributes to tameness and domestication-related behaviour in mice, including the identification of a gut bacterium with causal effects on tameness behaviour. This work contributed to a patent application (PCT/JP2024/018885), with national-phase entry in Japan, and a licensing agreement with Morinaga Milk Industry.
My research combines experimental and computational approaches, spanning molecular biology, microbiology, mouse behavioural phenotyping, metagenome assembly, genome binning, phylogenomics, and HPC-scale pipeline development. I have worked with bacterial, viral, and eukaryotic metagenome-assembled genomes and develop specialised reference datasets and scalable computational workflows for microbiome research.
Developing reference databases and benchmarked pipelines for profiling fungal and other eukaryotic components of the gut microbiome from shotgun sequencing data.
Building reproducible, scalable Snakemake workflows for population-scale metagenomic analysis across tens of thousands of samples on HPC infrastructure.
Investigating how bacterial, fungal, and viral components of the gut microbiome influence neurological and behavioural phenotypes in human cohorts and mouse models.
Constructing and curating MAG catalogues from diverse host populations to expand reference databases for microbial ecology research.
Feel free to reach out for inquiries or collaborations: bbb27[at]cam.ac.uk