Joseph Westley

The focus of my PhD is to better understand the evolutionary ecology of bacterial defence systems. I am specifically interested in understanding how the remarkable diversity of restriction modification systems (the most abundant bacterial defence systems) is maintained, selected for, and how it can impact the coevolutionary dynamics of bacteria and mobile genetic elements. To do this I utilise both bioinformatic analysis of large genomic datasets, and high-throughput coevolution experiments. This work has application in helping us understand the acquisition of novel drug resistance by pathogens, as well as the eco-evolutionary dynamics that can unfold when treating drug resistance bacterial infections with their natural predators, phages.

I am supervised by Professor Edze Westra and Professor Stineke van Houte at the University of Exeter, Professor Mark Szczelkun at the University of Bristol, and Dr Tatiana Dimitriu at the University of St Andrews. I am funded by the BBSRC SWBio DTP. I began my PhD in 2021, and am due to finish in September of 2025.