A warm welcome to Katy Statham and Graham Sharpe who started their PhD journey in our lab at the beginning of January. Katy joins us from Durham University were she successfully completed a Masters in Peter Etchells’ group, studying plant vascular development in Arabidopsis and Barley. Katy’s PhD aims to understand how floating aquatic plants such as duckweeds modify the wettability of their leaf surfaces to be optimally adapted to their amphibic habitat.

Graham discovered his passion for interdisciplinary research during his undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Plymouth where he worked with marine sponges, combining ecological field work with morphometrics and metabolomics. For his PhD, Graham will investigate the structural, biochemical and developmental underpinnings of wettable trapping surfaces in carnivorous pitcher plants across three independent lineages: Nepenthes, Cephalotus and Heliamphora.

Katy and Graham come with different backgrounds and skills, but both share the same infectious enthusiasm for their projects and for scientific discovery more widely. We are just as excited to have them in the lab!