Group photo - September 2022. From left to right: Sophie Jin, Richard Olumakaiye, Michaël Tadesse, Fabrizio Alberti, Jingfan Zhang, Panward Prasongpholchai, Tiantian Fu.
Present members
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Fabrizio is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. He started his independent research in 2018 through the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to investigate the biosynthesis of fungal meroterpenoids. Before then, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Corre Lab (2015-2018), working to discover new natural products from actinomycetes. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Bristol in the Foster/Bailey Lab (2012-2015), focusing on the biosynthesis of terpenoid antibiotics.
Dr Fabrizio Alberti
UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (Associate Professor)
Panward (Pan) completed her PhD from the Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick under the supervision of Dr Manuela Tosin and Dr Christophe Corre. Her PhD focused on the elucidation of a cryptic polyketide synthase biosynthetic pathway from Rhodococcus sp. Pan first joined the Alberti lab between March and June 2021, where she worked on improving the biomass production of mushroom-forming fungi when grown in different carbon sources. Before returning to the Alberti lab as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pan worked in Claudia Blindauer's group on the determination of Zn2+-binding proteins in plasma samples via 2D protein chromatography and MS.
Dr Panward Prasongpholchai
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr Tiantian Fu
Tiantian completed her PhD studies at the University of Warwick in Yin Chen’ lab at the School of Life Sciences (2013-2017), investigating the genetic and biochemical mechanism of quaternary amine degradation in the microbial community in human gut. Before joining the Alberti lab, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham working on host-microbial interaction using molecular microbiology techniques (2018-2020), a 3-month WISB Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017) and a 6-month WAMIC Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University (2016).
Senior Research Technician
Duha completed her PhD studies on the identification of the mechanism of action of stilbene antibiotics under the supervision of Fabrizio and Dr Nick Waterfield (Warwick Medical School). Duha is now a Senior Research Technician in the Alberti lab (maternity cover).
Dr Duha Alkhder
Senior Research Technician
Jack completed both his BSc in Biotechnology & Microbiology and his MSc in Biotechnology, Bioinformatics and Bio-business at the University of Aberdeen. He is now a SynBio CDT PhD student in the Alberti lab (co-supervised by Dr Christophe Corre), and he is studying the biosynthesis of terpenoid natural products in fungi.
Mr Jack Weaver
PhD student
Jingfan completed her BSc in Chemistry at Sichuan University, China. She was a visiting student for 5 months at Columbia University, New York City. She completed her MSc by Research with Dr Christophe Corre (primary supervisor) and Fabrizio (secondary supervisor) on a project that aimed to develop new biocatalysts from streptomycete-derived biosynthetic enzymes. Jingfan started her PhD with Fabrizio (primary supervisor) and Chris (secondary supervisor) in November 2020 thanks to the award of a University of Warwick/China Scholarship Council studentship.
Ms Jingfan Zhang
PhD student
Richard is a graduate of Microbiology from Landmark University, Nigeria. He completed his MSc degree from the University of Warwick where he studied Medical Biotechnology & Business Management. For his Master’s project he worked on understanding the biosynthesis of meroterpenoids in Basidiomycota, under Fabrizio's supervision. He went on to do his PhD in the Alberti lab, starting in November 2020, to continue with his research to study the biosynthesis of meroterpenoids in fungi.
Mr Richard Olumakaiye
PhD student
Ms Sophie Jin
PhD student
Sophie graduated from the French engineering school AgroParisTech where she obtained both her BSc and MSc in Biotechnology. In April 2021, she joined the Alberti Lab as a MIBTP PhD student (funded by both the University of Warwick and the BBSRC). She is now working under the supervision of Fabrizio and Dr Lijiang Song on the discovery of bioactive natural products from fungi of the genus Trichoderma that inhabit the rhizosphere of papaya plants, which could lead to the development of biocontrol agents to improve papaya crop yields.
Sophie is the 2022 recipient of the Brewster Scholarship, which is awarded to a PhD student from the Warwick School of Life Sciences in their second year of research whose work relates to crop improvement.
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Mr Michaël Tadesse
Michaël completed his BSc in Medical Sciences at the University of Exeter. He then obtained a MSc in Bioinformatics and Systems Biology from the University of Amsterdam and VU Amsterdam. He is currently working on a project that looks at combining bacteriophages and basidiomycete-derived antibiotics to combat antimicrobial resistance. He joined the Sagona Lab as a MIBTP PhD student in November 2021 with Fabrizio as his secondary supervisor.
PhD student
Joseph completed his BSc in chemistry at the University of Keele. He is currently an MRes student with Dr Matthew Jenner and Dr Fabrizio Alberti, studying 'Fungal siderophore biosynthesis'.
Mr Joseph Newman
MSc by Research student
Mr Jerry Yu
MBio student
Jerry is a 4th year UG student completing his MBio (integrated masters) in Biochemistry. He is currently working on his Master’s project on the engineering of yeast to produce natural rubber, under Fabrizio’s supervision, and co-supervised by Prof. Lorenzo Frigerio. During the summer, Jerry was part of the University of Warwick team partaking in iGEM, an international synthetic biology competition. The team supervised by Fabrizio and Dr Alex Darlington went on to achieve a gold medal, and a top nomination in best environmental project.
