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?
Cei Abreu-Goodger
I am a Reader in Bioinformatics at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution. My research interests are focused on small RNAs and transposable elements, using a variety of models, including host-pathogen interactions. I did my PhD in Mexico, on comparative genomics of bacterial riboswitches, a postdoc in Cambridge UK working on vertebrate microRNA function and was a group leader in Mexico for ten years before moving to the University of Edinburgh during the pandemic.
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.
Dhanya Cheerambathur
I am a group leader at the Institute of Cell Biology and my group studies the function of microtubules during brain development. I was born and raised in India and moved to the United States in 2002 to pursue higher education. In 2008, I obtained my Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, and then undertook a rather lengthy postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego. Following upon a discovery I had made during my postdoc, I decided to switch my research field from the study of cell division to neurodevelopment. With a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship from the Wellcome Trust, I started my research group at Edinburgh in 2018 to pursue my new scientific passion. Having a young child shortly after starting my group, followed by the pandemic, posed challenges to finding an effective work and life balance. Thus, managing my young research group while spending quality time with my family is something I had to learn and am still learning.
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.
Sandy Hetherington
I am a group leader in the Institute of Molecular Plants Sciences (IMPS) and I work on land plant evolution over geological timescales. I carried out an undergraduate degree in Geology before moving to Plant Sciences for my PhD at the University of Oxford. On completing my PhD I stayed in Oxford first as a postdoc, then as a junior research fellow before moving to IMPS to establish my group in October 2020 supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. My group and I aim to take an interdisciplinary approach to answer major questions in plant evolution.
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.