Research

Microbial communities drive biogeochemical cycles in every habitat on the planet. We study community assembly, functional potential, and species interactions across wastewater, soil, marine, and host-associated microbiomes. Our work asks a common set of questions regardless of the environment: who is there, what are they doing, and what shapes their response to perturbation?

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) reshape microbial physiology, from gene regulation to community structure. We study how oxidative stress rewires metabolism in microbial communities and use that understanding to engineer better outcomes in bioremediation, contaminant degradation, and waste-to-resource recovery. Current work focuses on redox-driven selection pressures in engineered biological systems and their downstream effects on process performance.

The gut microbiome is deeply tied to host metabolism, immunity, and disease. Conceptually, we treat the human gut as a host-regulated bioreactor: diet, host physiology, and metabolic state act as selection pressures that shape microbial composition and functional output, much like influent chemistry and redox conditions govern community dynamics in engineered systems. We apply computational approaches to characterise microbial shifts associated with metabolic disorders, inflammatory conditions, and antimicrobial exposure, with the goal of identifying microbial signatures and metabolic control points that distinguish disease from health.

Resistance genes do not respect boundaries between clinics, farms, and the environment. We track the emergence, horizontal transfer, and persistence of antimicrobial resistance determinants across human, animal, and environmental reservoirs. Our work spans pure-culture genomics to community-level resistome profiling in complex microbiomes, always asking what accelerates spread and where intervention is most effective.

Biology has moved beyond studying one molecular layer at a time. Genome, transcriptome, proteome, and metabolome interact and contradict each other in ways that only become visible when analysed together. We apply multi-omics integration to ask how microbial communities regulate their physiology under stress, how metabolic functions shift across environmental gradients, and where the real control points sit. Our strength is in combining existing tools to frame the right question and extract interpretable biology from high-dimensional data.

Biological function ultimately rests on molecular structure. We use all-atom molecular dynamics simulations to study how proteins, enzymes, carbohydrates, lignin, and synthetic polymers behave at atomic resolution, asking how mutations alter catalysis and how small molecules bind or stabilise their targets. Alongside classical MD, we integrate AI-driven structure prediction and diffusion-based generative models for ligand docking and de novo protein design.