Alison is a DPhil student researching how bacteria respond to antibiotic treatment.

Alison is a student on the BBSRC Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Programme and is supervised by Professor Achillefs Kapanidis. She uses microscopes, fluorescently tagged labels, and machine learning to see how bacteria change their internal structure and organisation when treated with antibiotics. This work can be used to rapidly identify the bacterial species and determine whether a bacterial sample is resistant to antibiotic treatment.

Alison is also studying how human-classified images can be used to understand the diverse features of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and increase the robustness of our diagnostic tools, through the citizen science project Infection Inspection.

Alison completed her BS in Physics at The University of Alabama. She is pursuing integrated training in biophysics and medicine, and following the DPhil will return to Harvard Medical School to complete her MD.