Office hours
Daniel shares caring responsibilities for his partner, who has severe ME, whole-body neuropathic pain, is bedbound, and lives with her parents. He spends around 25% of his working time there. He currently visits every third weekend, and while there he takes over caring responsibilities. Due to her being vulnerable, he also self-isolates the week before visiting.
This means his office hours in person are limited and variable, but he is always available on Teams and strives to arrange in person meetings whenever possible.
Dr Daniel Padfield
Senior Research Fellow
Ecology and Conservation
Environment and Sustainability Institute
Penryn Campus
Penryn TR10 9FE
Daniel Padfield is a NERC Independent Research fellow within the Centre for Ecology and Conservation. He is a microbial ecologist and carer who combines experiments, sequencing, and statistical approaches to understand how microbial communities respond to environmental change. His current work explores whether climate change will worsen the problem of antibiotic resistance. He is also committed to reproducible and open science. All of the code and data from his projects are freely available online through GitHub and archived on Zenodo.
He was awarded a PhD in Biological Sciences from the University of Exeter in 2017, where he specialised in the impacts of warming on the functioning of aquatic communities. He then did a postdoc at Exeter from 2017 to 2020 where he investigated the interplay between rapid evolution and community structure in soil bacteria, but alongside this led studies on the impact of warming on host-parasite interactions, and collaborated with members of the group on phage therapy. In 2021, he started another postdoc to investigate diversification in natural bacterial populations, and studied the macroevolution of microbes by sequencing samples from around Cornwall to see how bacteria transition between freshwater, land, and marine environments. During this time, he applied for fellowships and was lucky enough to secure the NERC IRF in 2022.
He has been using R for >10 years and authored and maintain the R packages nls.multstart and rTPC and specialise in the wrangling and manipulation of large datasets and statistical analyses. He is also a bioinformatician, processing and analysing everything from 16S sequencing to de novo genome assembly, the latter using bash. Basically a bit of jack-of-all-trades master of none!
Interests:
- Climate change
- Community ecology
- Microbial ecology
- Experimental evolution
- Thermal adaptation
- Open science
