people

Tom Williams

I’m an Irish computational evolutionary biologist interested in the history of life and the processes of evolution. I did a BA and PhD at Trinity College Dublin, doing work on the evolution of molecular chaperones and their client proteins with Mario Fares. I then moved to the UK with a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (those were the days) to join Martin Embley’s lab at Newcastle University, where I began to focus more on using phylogenetics and comparative genomics to study organismal evolution of Archaea, Bacteria, eukaryotes, and the tree of life. With some funding from the Royal Society, I started my group in 2015 at the University of Bristol (Earth Sciences, then Biological Sciences), and I moved to the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath in 2025. I mainly work on questions about the “tree of life”, evolution in deep time, and the evolution of (usually microbial) genomes, from the perspectives of phylogenetics, comparative genomics and bioinformatics. A lot of the focus is on trying to reconstruct the tree of life, compare support for different proposed evolutionary relationships, and on drawing inferences about the nature of early cellular ancestors and the course of early cellular evolution. All of the work in the group these days is purely computational, but we do collaborate with experimentalists to analyse new microbes, and sometimes other sorts of data (e.g., new protein structures).

Some of the questions I (and the lab) currently work on include:

• Reconstructing the “tree of life”
• The origin of eukaryotic cells
• Early cell evolution
• The course of metabolic evolution
• Co-evolutionary relationships, including symbiosis and endosymbiosis
• Phylogenetics and bioinformatics methods development

Our work is quite collaborative, including long-term collaborations with Philip Donoghue - palaeobiology, Cecile Gubry-Rangin - microbial ecology, Phil Hugenholtz - microbial evolution, Anja Spang - evolutionary microbiology, Gergely Szöllősi - method development, and many others (apologies if you are not listed here!).

Giorgio Bianchini

Postdoc

I am a Research Associate in the Department of Life Sciences at the University of Bath, studying the evolution of prokaryotic diversity and the origin of eukaryotes. I am generally interested in the development of computational methods for phylogenetic studies, which I have previously applied mainly to Cyanobacteria. During my research, I have developed a variety of software tools for bioinformatics, including sMap (a program to study trait evolution using stochastic mapping) and TreeViewer (a tool to draw and analyse phylogenetic trees), as well as general-purpose libraries such as VectSharp ( a lightweight library for C# vector graphics) and MuPDFCore (an open-source library to process PDF documents in C#). I obtained my BSc in Biological Sciences at the University of Pisa (Italy) with a dissertation on convergent evolution in three-spined stickleback (Gasterosteus aculeatus) populations. I completed my MSc project in Conservation and Evolution at the same university. I studied the applicability of miRNA cluster sequences as phylogenetic markers (using simulated sequences and real data from mammals and cyprinodontiform fishes). I also developed a computational method to choose the best markers to implement in phylogenetic analyses. During both my Master’s and Bachelor’s I was an Allievo Ordinario of the Scuola Normale Superiore, a leading institution in the Italian research system. In 2022, I obtained a PhD in Physical Geography at the University of Bristol, with a thesis titled “Bayesian methods using genomic data to gain insights into the history of photosynthesis”. For more information, you can access my personal website at https://giorgiobianchini.com/.

Zoe Vance

Postdoc; co-supervised with James Clark

My general background is in genetics, molecular evolution and bioinformatics, with my research interests lying specifically in the evolution of gene copy number and dosage. In my current work I am examining the evolutionary implications of whole-genome duplication in a wide range of systems as a member of the WGDip consortium. My role focuses on testing and development of phylogenetic approaches to both detect novel whole-genome duplications and investigate early stages in the resolution of known events.

Chenxue Lin

PhD Student

My research focuses on the origin and early evolution of eukaryotes. By integrating gene tree–species tree reconciliation and phylogenomic approaches, I reconstruct deep evolutionary relationships and investigate the position of the eukaryotic root. In addition, I am interested in plastid evolution, including primary endosymbiosis, the history of red algal–derived plastid transfers, gene transfer “highways,” and the reconstruction of ancestral archaeplastid nuclear and plastid genomes to better understand the mechanisms underlying genome reduction and endosymbiotic integration.

Katie Weir

PhD Student; co-supervised by Fotis Sgouridis and Chris Williamson

I am a PhD student in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, investigating the potential of clover-rhizobia associations to mitigate N2O emissions from agricultural soils in the UK. This work is a continuation of my MScR research, where I isolated rhizobia symbionts from soil samples using red clover plants to screen their genomes for the denitrification pathway. My PhD seeks to understand whether the denitrification pathway in rhizobia arose through horizontal gene transfer and to explore the evolutionary relationships between N2O-reducing strains, in addition to testing the functionality of these strains in pure culture and mesocosm greenhouse experiments.