School of Infection & Immunity

Wellcome Centre for Integrative Parasitology Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow Dr Emma Briggs recently received the Covid-delayed award of the British Society for Parasitology's 2020 President’s Medal.

The President’s Medal recognises the impact of research carried out by a member of the Society who will have no more than six years of postdoctoral research experience following the award of their PhD.

The recipient will have produced international quality research outputs, delivered tangible impacts to the field, and be able to demonstrate ambitions consistent with the potential to achieve a world-leading status within the research community.

Having focused on genetics during her undergraduate studies, Emma moved into parasitology to complete a PhD under the guidance of Professor Richard McCulloch at the WCIP.

Her thesis focused on understanding the distribution of RNA-DNA hybrids, or R-loops, in the genome of the African trypanosome, and how these important epigenetic features are processed by RNase H enzymes.

To follow up these findings, Emma remained as a post-doc within the McCulloch Group for a further year and was able to identify additional proteins which interact with such structures.

Emma has since started to pursue her own line of research as a Sir Henry Wellcome Fellow, working with Professor Keith Matthews, University of Edinburgh and Dr Thomas Otto, WCIP.

Over the course of the fellowship Emma is applying single-cell transcriptomics to African trypanosomes in order to dissect life cycle transitions, identify novel factors driving differentiation and study the role of transcript-regulating proteins.

Dr Briggs delivered her keynote address, R-loops of the Trypanosoma brucei genome and single cell transcriptomic reconstruction of bloodstream form differentiation, at BSP Parasites Online Spring Meeting 2021 on Thursday 24 June.

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First published: 12 July 2021