Projects

Current projects

• EUPAHW Animal Health and Welfare Internal Programme: Easter Bush lead for SOA 28 – “Risk of spread of AMR and associated genes in veterinary pathogens” (2025-2028).
• Houghton Trust Small Project Research Grant (principal investigator) (2025-2026) – “Chicken dendritic cell – microbiota interplay in vaccine-mediated responses”.
• Roslin Foundation PhD studentship (primary supervisor): Student – Mingzhen Jiang (2026-2031) – “Constructing simplified microbial communities to understand fibre fermentation in the chicken gut microbiota”.
• BBSRC New Investigator Award (principal investigator) (2026-2030) – “Impact of microbiota transplantation on fibre fermentation in chickens”.
• Flexible Talent Mobility Award (principal investigator) (2026-2027) – “Uniting the Roslin Institute and Estonian University of Life Sciences for Microbiome and AMR Research in Livestock Infectious Diseases”. 
• Roslin Institute ISP Pump Priming 2026 (principal investigator) (2026-2027) – “The milk microbiota and metabolite production in mastitis”.
• Roslin Institute ISP Pump Priming 2026 (co-applicant) (2026-2027) – “Potential of long-read PacBio metagenomics to generate near-complete MAGs and resolve free plasmids in complex faecal samples’”. 
   

Completed projects

• SFC-ISPF 24-25 partnership award (co-applicant) (2023-2024) – “Understanding antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Yak milk microbiomes: An interdisciplinary capacity building approach in Nepal”
• International Institutional Award 2024 (co-applicant) (2024) – “International Collaborative Workshop to catalyse Horizon Europe funding application to understand and improve the productivity, survivability and sustainability of Guinea Fowl systems for small holder farmers”.
• ISP Pump Priming grant (co-applicant) (2024-2025) – “Metagenomics in Mussels unveiling Immune Gene Presence-Absence Variation and large Structural Variants.”
• ISP Pump Priming grant (co-applicant) (2024-2025) – “Testing establishment of MDR E. coli ST131 in the pig gastrointestinal tract and impact of phage intervention in vivo and in bioreactors.”
• BBSRC grant BB/V018450/1 (principal investigator) (2023-2024) – “Enriching Mgnify Genomes to capture the full spectrum of the microbiota and bolster taxonomic classifications”
• Roslin ISP ECR grant (2022) – “The microbiota of gene-edited chickens”.
• Roslin ISP ECR Grant (2022) – “Metagenomic characterisation of the caecal microbiota of XCR1 knockout chickens”.
• BBSRC Impact Acceleration Accounts (IAA) (2020) – “Characterization of novel enzymes derived from gastrointestinal microbiota for livestock feed additive commercialization””
• ISP Early Career Grant (2020) – “Towards a functional understanding of the chicken caecal microbiota via culturing of novel strains and species of bacteria”.
• Houghton Trust Small Project Grant (2019) – “The impact of a natural microbiota treatment on the chicken respiratory microbiota and the response to live-attenuated viral vaccines.”