Eva Hamrud
Academic and Work Experience Prior to Sept 2019 Programme Start
I completed a bachelor’s degree in Natural Sciences at University of Cambridge and a master’s degree in biotechnology at Imperial College London. I then worked for two years at AstraZeneca in Gothenburg, Sweden.
PhD Programme – Year 1 – MRes and Project Rotations
My first rotation was a joint project between Davide Danovi and Eileen Gentleman. I used live imaging and particle tracking to develop a workflow for microrheology measurements. Microrheology is a method that detects local changes in material stiffness. The workflow was used to measure the ability of immune cells to remodel their hydrogel environment in an organoid model system for inflammatory bowel disease.
I carried out my second rotation with Andrea Streit investigating neural tube patterning in the developing chick embryo. I worked both experimentally collecting embryos for single cell sequencing experiments, and computationally analysing the results of previous datasets to identify transcription factors that could be important for neural tube patterning.
In my final rotation, I worked remotely during the UK COVID-19 lockdown with Cynthia Andoniadou to characterise the WNT signalling landscape in the different cells of the anterior pituitary. I analysed single cell sequencing datasets from three different timepoints to identify the different cell types and searched for differences in WNT-related gene expression between cell types.
PhD Programme – Years 2 to 4 – Doctoral Studies
My PhD project aims to identify the gene regulatory network underlying cell fate choices during placode development. My supervisors are Andrea Streit and Nick Luscombe. Placodes are thickenings of ectoderm in the vertebrate embryo which give rise to the essential sensory system of the head. Although a lot of research has focused on signalling, cell movements and timings of placode development, a mechanistic understanding of how placodal progenitors differentiate into cranial placodes is still missing.
The aim of this project is to reconstruct the molecular circuitry, the gene regulatory network, that drives cell fate decisions in developing placodes. This will make use of single cell gene expression and ATAC-seq data and subsequent perturbation analysis in the chick. Increasing our understanding of placode development will enable us to understand the mechanism behind a range of congenital diseases which can cause hearing loss and craniofacial malformations. More broadly, this study hopes to reveal general principles of cell fate decisions and expand our range of tools to study them in other contexts.
