Academic Promotions 2014-2015

The School of Biosciences is pleased to announce a number of academic promotions for the academic year 2014/1015, including two new Personal Chairs for Drs Helen White-Cooper and Jo Cable. 

Helen White Cooper: Personal Chair

Sperm are particularly specialised cells, with a uniquely challenging job – swimming out from the body that made them, finding an egg, fertilising it, and activating development of the next generation. 

Helen White-Cooper's major achievements have been in determining how a very large number of specific genes are turned on in testes to ensure normal sperm production. She has identified a set of regulatory genes and is determining how they function to promote testis gene expression and thus sperm production and male fertility.

Helen's research focuses on fruit flies, however these testis-specific regulators from flies have homologues in other animals, including humans. The homologues function in regulation of gene expression, are essential for normal development, and also implicated in diseases including cancer. Helen is extremely pleased to be awarded a personal chair in recognition of the research carried out by herself and her team over many years.

Jo Cable:  Personal Chair

The School of Biosciences is now a preferred host for parasitologists with Jo Cable's promotion to personal chair. For the last 20 years, Jo has worked on the ecology of infectious diseases, particularly aquatic health, and the impact of parasites and invasive species on fish stocks. 

With >115 ISI papers in this field, she has boosted ecological parasitology internationally, partly through her associations with the British Society for Parasitology, but also with her long term academic and industrial collaborators, and friends at the Environment Agency and Cefas. At Cardiff, Jo has a stellar research team who are using fish models to identify patterns of disease transmission in aquatic environments.

The School is also pleased to pleased to announce the following academic promotions.

• Readership - Dr. Hilary Rogers
• Readership- Dr. Matt Smalley
• Senior Lectureship - Dr. Isabelle Durance
• Senior Lectureship - Dr. Julia Gerasimenko
• Senior Lectureship - Dr. Sarah Hall
• Senior Lectureship - Dr. Nick Kent
• Senior Lectureship - Dr. Jo Lello