Postdoc Advisors
The School has a group of Postdoc Advisors who are available to meet with you.
How to contact an advisor
You are welcome to contact any of the Advisors. If you are unsure who to choose please email sbs-postdoc-advisors@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk. They will aim to meet with you within two weeks of your request or if they will not be available within that time period, direct you to one of the other advisors.
What can an advisor help with?
- Career Development - including helping you to find contacts in non-academic careers for advice
- Fellowships - including helping you to find contacts who are previous recipients of fellowships you wish to target
- Any issue related to your work as a postdoc in SBS - where appropriate directing you to the best source of support
Who are our Postdoc Advisors?
Liz Bayne

Atlanta Cook

I am a structural biologist and biochemist in IQB3. I did my PhD in Oxford and went on to do a postdoc initially at the EMBL in Heidelberg before moving with my postdoc supervisor to the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried, Germany. I moved to Edinburgh in 2011 with an MRC Career Development Award to start my own group and currently hold a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship.
Guillaume Blin

I am based in the Center for Regenerative Medicine in Little France, where my group aims to understand cell fate patterning during early embryogenesis. I obtained my PhD from the University of Montpellier in France where I studied stem cell biology and regenerative medicine of the infarcted heart. I then moved to the Lowell lab in 2012, here in Edinburgh. Thanks to the excellent scientific environment and support from my colleagues, I managed to obtain a Sir Henry Wellcome postdoctoral fellowship. This allowed me to develop imaging and microfabrication techniques to understand how cells organise in 3D space during development. I obtained a lectureship position in 2019. I work full time and try to achieve a healthy work / family life balance – something I had to learn over the years as a father of two children born at the end of my PhD for the oldest and during the early years of my postdoc for the youngest.
Dan Nussey

Gerben van Ooijen

I work at the Institute of Molecular Plant Science, where I study circadian timekeeping on a cellular level in algae and plants. I received my PhD from the Molecular Plant Pathology group at the University of Amsterdam, and then switched research topic when I came to the Centre for Systems Biology at Edinburgh (later re-named SynthSys) as a post-doc. I worked there on multiple shorter contracts for 4 years, until I secured a University Research Fellowship from the Royal Society to start my own lab in 2012. I am also a Postdoc Champion and a Postgraduate Advisor for the School. Although I work full-time, I usually manage to balance work with family life as a father of two small children.
Jenny Regan

I am a Lecturer in the Institute of Immunology and Infection Research, where my group works on sex differences in innate immunity and ageing. I did my PhD in developmental biology at UCL, switching fields to immunity during my first postdoc in Lisbon, where I received both an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellowship and an FCT (Portuguese) Fellowship. I returned to UCL as a senior post-doc, researching ageing as part of large EU consortium. After a short time as a Visiting Scientist in the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Cologne, I came to Edinburgh in 2017 to start my position here. I work full-time, but as I have a young son, I try to strike a good work-life balance.