Alison MacFadyen
I’m a computational biologist and molecular microbiologist based in Suffolk. I study how antimicrobial resistance moves between bacterial species — specifically, how mobile genetic elements called SCCmec assemble and transfer within commensal staphylococcal populations, creating reservoirs that seed resistance into clinically important pathogens.
I develop bioinformatics tools to tackle these questions at scale. My tool, SCCmecExtractor enables the systematic detection and characterisation of SCCmec elements across the Staphylococcus genus.
I’m currently a Computational Biologist at The Sainsbury Laboratory on the Norwich Research Park. My background spans industrial biotechnology, environmental engineering and molecular epidemiology, with positions at the Universities of Strathclyde, Newcastle, Edinburgh and Glasgow. I hold a PhD from the University of Strathclyde, in Molecular Microbiology and Genomics.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to discuss potential projects.