Staff Profile

Qualifications

PhD (Life Sciences) – University of Warwick (2019 – 2024)

MBio (Biological Sciences with Biomedical Sciences) – University of Warwick (2015 – 2019)

Positions

Postdoctoral Research Associate (Childhood Cancer Genomics) – Newcastle University (2024 – Present)

My research focuses on understanding how gene regulatory mechanisms shape cellular identity, tissue function, and disease through integrative experimental and computational approaches. I am particularly interested in applying functional genomics and transcriptomics to investigate dynamic changes in cellular states across development, tissue injury, and disease.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Wolfson Childhood Cancer Research Centre, Newcastle University, where I use single-cell transcriptomics and multi-omic approaches to study the molecular and cellular consequences of radiotherapy-induced brain injury in novel medulloblastoma treatment models. My work aims to understand the biological mechanisms underlying radiation-induced neurocognitive deficits in childhood brain tumour survivors and identify pathways with therapeutic potential.

My background combines molecular biology, developmental biology, and computational genomics. During my PhD at the University of Warwick, I investigated the molecular basis of functional divergence between duplicated Sox transcription factors during vertebrate development using CRISPR-based perturbation, transcriptomics, chromatin profiling, imaging, and computational analysis.

As a hybrid experimental-computational researcher, I work across both wet-lab and bioinformatic approaches, with experience spanning single-cell and bulk RNA-seq, ChIP-seq, CUT&Tag, ATAC-seq, whole genome and exome sequencing, multi-omic data integration, CRISPR genome editing, imaging, and next-generation sequencing workflows. Computationally, I use R, Python, Unix, and high-performance computing environments for the analysis and visualisation of large-scale sequencing datasets.

I am particularly interested in multidisciplinary and translational research that bridges mechanistic biology with clinically relevant questions.

• Articles

  • Riley DM, Elsayed R, Walsh MD, Johal S, Lin Y, Walton H, Bretschneider T, Ott S, Nelson AC. Functional genomics analysis of developing zebrafish and human endoderm reveals highly conserved cis-regulatory modules acting during vertebrate organogenesis. Genome Research 2026, 36.
  • Johal S, Elsayed R, Wang D, Talbolt C, Feuda R, Panfilio KA, Nelson AC. Molecular and Functional Divergence of Zebrafish Sox Paralogs Controlling Endoderm Formation and Left–Right Patterning. Genome Biology and Evolution 2025, 11.