Experience and impact

A PhD in cell and molecular biology, then two postdoctoral fellowships. The doctoral work asked how Vibrio cholerae — the bacterium that causes cholera — switches its virulence genes on, and how that switch is controlled at the level of translation. The first postdoctoral position worked on multivalent vaccines against two biodefence pathogens. The second, at a naval medical research unit, looked at wound infection: how Staphylococcus aureus and Pseudomonas aeruginosa build biofilms that antibiotics struggle to reach, and whether nanoparticles and laser treatment could help antibiotics get through.

Five papers came out of that decade, all of them still listed here with their original records. They are the reason the writing on this site can say where a claim comes from.

Leading an integrated evidence plan means asking a blunt question early: what do we not yet know that someone will need to know, and what study would actually answer it? Then sequencing that work so the answers arrive in a useful order rather than all at once, years late.

Alongside the planning sits the operational half — managing a portfolio of 67 active post-marketing studies, reviewing investigator-initiated research proposals, and serving on a committee deciding which independent medical education is worth funding. Much of it is judgement about what evidence is worth generating at all.

Two named courses at university level: undergraduate Microbiology, taught from 2008 to 2015, and a graduate course in Microbial Pathogenesis from 2010 to 2014. Fifteen lectures in the first, four in the second — small numbers, stated precisely, because a lecture is a real unit of work and rounding it up would be the first small lie.

The professional version of the same work involves scientific and clinical training of colleagues in Europe, field medical education across US territories, and building a medical-affairs onboarding curriculum from scratch for a team that did not previously have one.

A vaccine reaching approval is not the same as a vaccine reaching people. The gap between the two is filled with education: what the vaccine does, who it is for, what the evidence shows, what it does not show, and how it fits a schedule clinicians already find crowded.

That work has covered a cholera vaccine in the United States and Europe, a virus-like-particle vaccine for chikungunya, and typhoid and rabies vaccines — with health departments, hospital systems and universities as the audience. The cholera thread is the one that closes a loop: the doctoral research on this site asked how Vibrio cholerae turns its virulence genes on.

Evidence generation touches clinical development, commercial teams, health economics and real-world evidence, regulatory affairs and legal review. Each has a different idea of what a claim is and what would justify it. Getting a study designed, run and reported requires all of them to agree, and someone has to hold the scientific line while that happens.

The external half is convening expert panels: identifying which specialists have genuinely relevant experience, setting an agenda worth their time, and preparing scientific content that invites disagreement rather than staging approval.

Selection for a university teaching fellows programme is a statement that teaching was treated as a discipline rather than a duty attached to research. The two courses above ran across seven years between them.

Mentoring is harder to evidence and easier to overstate, so it is stated plainly: it is listed among demonstrated skills on the résumé, and nothing more is claimed for it here.