How I got to where I am now 🔬
1993¶
I'm Tom. I was born in Margate, England and grew up (mostly) in the sleepy coastal town of Birchington, England. I was interested in science from an early age but didn't have a formal scientific education in primary school. I navigated the UK's public selective school entrance exams and secured a place at Chatham House Grammar School for Boys, now known as Chatham & Clarendon Grammar School, in Ramsgate, England.
2005¶
Considering the area, I was lucky enough to have some really excellent science teachers, especially Mr. Chris Bowman who was the longest serving member of staff at the school, teaching science from 1993-2024! I was convinced to study Biology, Chemisty, English Literature and Computer Science at A-level and briefly moved to Salisbury, England, where I won a place at Bishop Wordsworth's School. Here, I was a member of the The British Association of Young Scientists, and because of our proximity to Public Health England (currently UKHSA) Porton Down, we were lucky enough have a scientist (sorry I can't remember your name!) from the Vaccine Development and Evaluation Centre come and speak to us about how they were developing tools to reduce antimicrobial resistance to tuberculosis (TB). This short talk connected all the dots for me - from that point I was pretty convinced I wanted to do the same thing.
2012¶
Realising the traditional, rigid path to institutions like Oxford wasn't quite my style, I pivoted my focus and ultimately secured a clearing place at the University of Roehampton to study a BSc. (Hons) in Biomedical Science in London, England. During my undergraduate years, I took the scenic route—honing my entrepreneurial and creative skills by producing/DJing music and starting a record label with my best friend. These unconventional "distractions" actually taught me the hustle, networking, and creative problem-solving that I would later lean heavily on in academia.
I rocked up to a microbiology lecture at some point in my second year, taught by Dr. Michael Hornsey who was talking about the evolution of antimicrobial resistance in bacteria, and again, I was hooked. Turns out Mike (another Margate lad) was accepting students for honours projects based on his latest work on A. baumannii tigecycline resistance with David Wareham (see Nat Comms paper1) and after an email, he let me approach the project with my own idea. After we knew that efflux pumps were responsible for reduced susceptibility to tigecycline, I wanted to grow A. baumannii under tigecycline pressure in the presence of an efflux inhibitor to find any other intrinisc mechanisms contributing to resistance.
When Mike eventually left the university, I smoothly transitioned to a project under Dr. Volker Behrends, analysing NMR spectra of P. aeruginosa metabolites from the sputum of cystic fibrosis patients. Volker had developed a Matlab program which allowed peaks in NMR spectra to be mapped to metabolites produced by P. aeruginosa during the infection - so the whole project was technically my first foray in microbial bioinformatics.
2015¶
Armed with my degree and a wealth of practical and creative experience, I briefly worked as a microbiologist at Leatherhead Food Research, before landing
a position on the BSAC resistance surveilnace project at UKHSA Colindale, London, England. This was basically my dream job,
collecting and testing isolates from participating NHS hospitals, and performing large-scale agar dilution MICs to monitor nationwide AMR
rates in bacteria causing respiratory and bloodstream infections.
However, living in London is expensive and I was still deeply curious about microbial bioinformatics, so I successfully leveraged my skills into a new role in the Genomics Services and Development Unit, performing Illumina short-read whole genome sequencing on priority pathogens sent to the UKHSA.
As much as I loved my time at UKHSA, and my social life in London (which had become my spiritual home), my scientific curiosity still wasn't fully satisfied. I would relentlessly check FindAPhD until one project screamed out at me. It was a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, UKHSA and Shionogi to understand resistance mechanisms to the new antibiotic, cefederocol, in priority Gram Negative pathogens - literally the dream. Relying on my undeniable passion and hard-earned laboratory experience rather than a perfect academic transcript, I took my chances. The next thing I knew, I was on a train to Edinburgh, Scotland.
2018¶
This was not a descision I took lightly - my life changed forever after I did my PhD, in good ways and bad ways. I will eventually do a blog post about my PhD experience. But for any prospective PhD students reading this, I would highly reccomend not doing a PhD for the CV clout, do it because you are obsessed with the topic - and trust me, we can tell.
:lucide-virus: 2020¶
COVID-19 happened, and I was kicked out of the lab during a 3-year wet-lab based PhD project. What could have been a disaster turned into my greatest opportunity. I had shown an early interest in bioinformatics, which became a lifeline as I worked on computational side-projects that eventually blossomed into a whole thesis chapter! I quickly realised that with Python, Bash and R, I wasn't constrained to the physical limitations of the wet-lab. I could not only ask any research question I wanted to, but I could answer it by myself! for free!
2021¶
A. Prof Kelly Wyres advertised a postdoc postion on the platform formally known as Twitter, looking at genomic sero-epidemiology of K. pneumoniae. I slid in the DMs (networking pays off!), and the rest is history!