ILESLA People

Gail Preston, Director, and Chair

Biodiversity & Sustainability, Animal & Human Health

Gail Preston studied Natural Sciences at Christ’s College, University of Cambridge, followed by a Ph.D. in Plant Pathology at Cornell University. She was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship in 2001. In 2009 she became a Programme Director at the University of Oxford's Doctoral Training Centre and she is currently the Director of the UKRI-BBSRC-funded Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership, the Deputy Director of the MPLS Doctoral Training Centre and a fellow of Linacre College. She is the Vice-President of the British Society for Plant Pathology and a senior editor for Microbiology.

David Marshall, Director & Chair

Climate & Earth

I'm a Physical Oceanographer in the Department of Physics, University of Oxford, and I'm interested in the fluid dynamics of the global ocean circulation. My work spans a wide range of scales, from meters to global, and days to millennia. I use a range of approaches including pen and paper, computational models and observations.

Esther Becker, Director and Chair

Animal & Human Health

Esther graduated from the University of Amsterdam cum laude with a MSc degree in Medical Biology in 2000.  She then joined the Biomedical and Biological Sciences program at Harvard University, where she performed her PhD training with Azad Bonni. Her work as a graduate student has made significant contributions to our understanding of the specific signaling mechanisms that regulate cell death in the nervous system, particularly in the developing cerebellum. For her graduate studies, Esther was awarded a PhD Fellowship from the Boehringer Ingelheim Fonds and an Albert J. Ryan Foundation Fellowship.

After completing her PhD in 2006, Esther joined Kay Davies’ group in the Department of Physiology, Anatomy and Genetics, having been awarded a Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship and later an OXION Training Fellowship. In 2010, Esther was awarded a prestigious Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellowship from the Royal Society to establish her own research programme, focussing on the genetic and molecular underpinnings of cerebellar ataxia in mice and humans.  Esther joined the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences in 2020. She is also Co-Director of the Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership and Vice President and Official Fellow (Cellular Life) at Reuben College.

David Gavaghan, Director and Chair

Transformative Technologies

I received my undergraduate degree in Mathematics from Durham University in 1986. I then moved to the University of Oxford, where I was awarded an MSc in Numerical Analysis and Mathematical Modelling in 1987, followed by a DPhil in the Development of Parallel Numerical Algorithms in 1991. I have subsequently worked in the field of Mathematical and Computational Modelling, establishing and leading the Computational Biology Group, based principally within Oxford's Department of Computer Science. I was appointed Professor of Computational Biology in 2004. I have supervised thirty DPhil projects to completion, and I am currently involved with the supervision of a further six.

All of my research is interdisciplinary and involves application of mathematical and computational techniques to problems in biomedicine. My core research revolves around the modelling of physiological and biological systems and associated measurement techniques: current areas of focus include the mammalian heart, tumour development, and electrochemical measurement techniques.

Martin Robinson, Theme Lead

Transformative Technologies

Martin Robinson is a Senior Research Software Engineer (RSE) in the Oxford RSE group, part of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. 

I completed my PhD on "Mixing and Turbulence using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics" in the School of Mathematical Sciences at Monash University, Australia, under the supervision of Prof. Joseph Monaghan and Dr. Paul Cleary from the Computational Modelling group at CSIRO Mathematics. After this I became a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher, working on multiphase simulations of fluid-particle systems in the Multiscale Mechanics Group at the University of Twente. I then moved to the Oxford Centre for Collaborative Applied Mathematics (OCCAM) at the University of Oxford, working on multiscale reaction-diffusion modelling, before I ended up in in the Department of Computer Science at Oxford, first as part of the Computational Biology group and then, co-founder of the Oxford Research Software Engineering group.

EJ Milner-Gulland, Theme Lead

Biodiversity and Sustainability

EJ is interested in understanding how social, ecological and behavioural factors interact and how they affect key issues in current conservation.

She was lead author on a 2021 paper outlining the 'Four Steps for the Earth' framework for implementing global commitments to tackling biodiversity loss - which the International Union for Conservation of Nature has voted to support and promote.

Her research group focuses on three themes: understanding resource user incentives, planning for effective and socially just conservation, and accounting for social-ecological system dynamics. They seek to understand and improve the effectiveness of different approaches to designing conservation interventions, in both land and marine ecosystems.

Professor Milner-Gulland also works on the illegal wildlife trade and is interested in designing, monitoring and evaluating conservation interventions in order to improve their effectiveness. She is particularly interested in the conservation ecology of the saiga antelope in Central Asia, and co-founded the Saiga Conservation Alliance in 2006 as well as the Conservation Optimism movement in 2016.

Mike Hough, Harwell Campus, Theme Lead

Transformative Technologies

Mike is Principal Beamline Scientist of the room-temperature in situ beamline VMXi at Diamond Light Source and Honorary Professor at the University of Essex. After an undergraduate degree in physics and PhD in structural biology, he worked at the Synchrotron Radiation Source at Daresbury laboratory and in several universities. He was an academic in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex from 2011 to 2021 before moving to Diamond.

Trevor Sweeney, Pirbright, Theme Lead

Animal and Human Health

Trevor established his lab in 2014 in the Division of Virology at the University of Cambridge after he was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship and from 2016-2026 is supported by a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship sponsored by the Wellcome Trust and Royal Society to study RNA virus replication, with a focus on Zika virus-host interactions. Trevor joined The Pirbright Institute in 2021, where he leads the Viral Gene Expression group, focussing on the role of RNA structure and RNA-protein interactions in regulating viral replication. He is keen to hear from those interested in joining the lab for postgraduate studies or postdoctoral research.

Andrew Jones, Oxford Brookes, Theme Lead

Rules of Life

I completed my Biochemistry undergraduate degree at Imperial College London in 1996. I was then awarded a PhD at the University of Leeds in 2000, studying acetylcholinesterase and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors of the blood fluke, Schistosoma. In 2001 I carried on research of invertebrate cys-loop ligand-gated ion channels at the MRC Functional Genomics Unit, Oxford, until 2011. After a year's postdoctoral research at the Botnar Institute, Oxford, I became Senior Lecturer in Molecular Biology and Genomics at Oxford Brookes University in 2012.

Linda Speight, Theme Lead

Climate and Earth

Linda Speight is a hydrometeorologist whose research seeks to develop early warning systems to improve disaster risk management, particularly for flooding. She is interested in global flood forecasting, surface water flood forecasting, ensemble forecasts, impact-based forecasts, risk communication, decision making and climate resilience.

Linda joined the University of Oxford in 2021, moving from the University of Reading where she was a postdoctoral researcher. Prior to joining the University of Reading, Linda was a Senior Scientist at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) where she was involved in operational flood forecasting and led the scientific development of the Scottish Flood Forecasting Service. Linda has a BSc from the University of Bristol (2005) and an MSc from Newcastle University (2006). Her PhD research, completed at the University of Newcastle in 2013, sought to develop a methodology for understanding dependencies in flood risk exposure in the UK. Linda has also held associate lecturing positions at the University of Lincoln and the University of Portsmouth. She started her career as a flood risk analyst at JBA Consulting.

Neil Edwards, Open University, Climate & Earth

Climate and environmental change breaks the statistical predictability that underlies insurance against natural disasters, questions the regulation of borrowing and investment between generations, disturbs the ecological systems that support the global population and threatens the stability of nations. 

The impacts and feedbacks are dynamic, complex and multi-scale in space and time, they cannot be properly managed without an evolving dialogue that thoroughly explores the interface between environmental and socio-economic change. 

My research exploits dynamically simplified Earth system models and complementary approaches to bring the understanding of processes and feedbacks between natural and human systems and sub-systems to the fore.

Through a series of major interdisciplinary consortium projects, including GENIE and ERMITAGE, I have played a leading role in the integration of modelling and observational paleoclimate research and in the integration of detailed Earth system models with complex macroeconomic and energy technology forecasting models for the purposes of environmental policy assessments. 

Francesco Crea, Open University, Animal and Human Health

I am Professor of Pharmacology in the School of Life Health and Chemical Sciences at the Open University. More information on my research can be found here: Professor Francesco Crea | OU people profiles.  I am currently  Director of Research in the School until July 2025, supporting researchers in different areas including research grants, research engagement, PhD supervision, research collaborations and REF.

Luke Clifton, ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Transformative Technologies

Dr Luke Clifton is a UKRI individual merit fellow undertaking and supporting structural studies on membrane biochemical events at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon Source, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Luke undertook his PhD in the area of biophysical chemistry at the University of Reading. After completing this in 2008 he began working at ISIS, developing its biology programme. As an instrument scientist at ISIS Luke developed a series of model membrane systems which allow users of the facility to gain a precision structural understanding of membrane biochemical events and he supports a programme of applied research in this area. In 2024 Luke became a UKRI individual merit fellow with a remit to continue to develop the applications of neutron scattering to structural studies on biological membranes.