Biography
Dr Parker joined the National Biofilms Innovation Centre’ in 2018 shortly after its formation. He is developing lab techniques, statistical methods, and software to exploit portable, real-time DNA sequencing for biofilm microbial community analyses. These will enable non-experts with minimal equipment to explore these ubiquitous microcosms’ composition, evolution and ecology, rapidly, anywhere on the planet. During the COVID-19 pandemic he served on secondment to the Department for Health & Social Care, designing and commissioning a novel, highly-automated testing lab capable of processing tens of thousands of samples daily.
Previously he held an independent Early-Career Research Fellowship at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (where he published the first-ever demonstration of congeneric species ID by genome-scale DNA sequencing in the field), and Queen Mary, University of London, where he published the first-ever detection of adaptive molecular convergent evolution (in Nature). He is a Fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute, and tutors MBiol students in statistics, research skills, modelling and bioinformatics.
Publications (full list https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=_WCn7AYAAAAJ&hl=en):
Parker et al. (2008) Correlating viral phenotypes with phylogeny: accounting for phylogenetic uncertainty. Infection, Genetics and Evolution 8(3):239-246
Parker et al. (2013) Genome-wide signatures of convergent evolution in echolocating mammals. Nature 502(7470):228-231
Tsagkogeorga et al. (2013) Phylogenomic analyses elucidate the evolutionary relationships of bats. Current Biology 23(22): 2262-2267
Gray et al. (2011) The mode and tempo of hepatitis C virus evolution within and among hosts. BMC evolutionary biology 11 (1):1-10
Parker et al. (2018) Field-based species identification of closely-related plants using real-time nanopore sequencing. Scientific reports 7(1):8345
Highmore et al. (2022) Translational challenges and opportunities in biofilm science: a BRIEF for the future. npj Biofilms and Microbiomes 8(1):68.
Positions
- Lecturer in Biology
Subjects
- Biology