Dr Bridget Penman appointed Fellow and Tutor in Biology at St Peter’s College

St Peter’s College is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Bridget Penman as Fellow and Tutor in Biology.

Dr Penman studied Biological Sciences at St Hugh’s College, Oxford and then went on to obtain a DPhil in what was then Oxford’s Department of Zoology (now the Department of Biology). Following her doctoral studies, she received a Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellowship and was a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. In 2016, Dr Penman became an Assistant (later Associate) Professor at the University of Warwick School of Life Sciences, where she worked until 2024. Dr Penman joins St Peter’s on 1 October 2024.

Dr Penman’s research focuses on infection genetics, in particular how the genetic makeup of an individual affects the severity of the infections they experience. She uses mathematical and computational models to study how pathogens and their hosts evolve in a range of different systems. While she is especially interested in malaria, she also wants to uncover general rules of infection genetics.

She said, ‘Host genes that affect how ill we get and pathogen genes that affect how well they can infect us are, to me, some of the most fascinating genes to study.’

She first encountered mathematical models applied to biological problems as an undergraduate, and became fascinated by the idea that we can use models to simulate the behaviour of a mutated gene in a population, or to understand how a pathogen behaves. For her undergraduate research project, she investigated how humans have adapted to malaria, using a population genetic model. ‘I found this so interesting that I didn’t want to stop!’ she said.

She recently showed that contrasting human evolutionary adaptations to the two major human malaria parasites Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax could be a consequence of the way immunity is gained to the two different species (Penman and Gandon, 2020, PloS Computational Biology). The Academy of Medical Sciences awarded her a Springboard Grant in Springboard Round 7 to pursue research into immunogenetics.

In College, Dr Penman will provide tutorials on a range of biological topics to first-year St Peter’s biologists and will teach quantitative methods and data handling to St Peter’s biologists in years 2-4 (as well as supporting them to find specialist tutorials relevant to their interests from colleagues across the University). In the Biology Department, she will deliver teaching relating to infectious diseases, host genetics and One Health.

During her tenure as an Assistant Professor and then Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick, Dr Penman was a member of Warwick’s Zeeman Institute, a cross-departmental research institute devoted to using mathematical and computational techniques to solve biological problems. She also helped to run the Midlands Integrative Biosciences Doctoral Training Partnership (MIBTP), which is a BBSRC-funded PhD training programme.

‘The Zeeman Institute taught me a great deal about interdisciplinary research, which I hope to apply in my new role,’ she said, ‘and MIBTP taught me about the highs and lows of PhD life in a way that I would never have understood from my own doctoral studies alone. I hope this has made me a better supervisor for my current and future students. I am greatly looking forward to working with the St Peter’s biologists and being part of the St Peter’s community and cannot wait to get started.’

To learn more about Dr Penman’s publications, view her Google scholar page here.