Profile

I grew up in Auckland, New Zealand and have always been interested in why the living world the way it is. Since a young age I have been fascinated by biology and evolution. This probably stems from a love of dinosaurs and other prehistoric life! This eventually led to me pursuing a PhD. I have played many sports throughout my life, but right now my main focus is rock-climbing where I go multiple times a week. I love listening to music and will constantly be listening throughout the day. I love all animals but primates and birds are my favourite!

I research the DNA of slow lorises, a small nocturnal endangered primate from southeast Asia. I primarily search for DNA sequences which have originated from a type of virus called retroviruses. These viruses infect the host and leave their DNA within the host. This happens to every vertebrate species including humans! This is not harmful however, and in few cases the host receives great benefit from this virus DNA. We are looking for them within slow lorises because very little has been studied within them and we want to see if patterns of virus DNA we see in humans are similar within this distant species.

Another part of my work is looking at the total host DNA of the slow loris and seeing if it can tell us about the species past.

I often am running codes and scripts which allow me to search the slow loris DNA for the DNA of viruses. We take segments of virus DNA and compare it to DNA within slow loris to see if we can find any old viruses. I can then extract these regions and examine them to see how complete and old they are and if they are similar to any other viruses.