Dr Hayley Thompson joined the NRI in 2022 as a Molecular Microbiologist on the RodentGate project. Prior to joining NRI, Hayley has spent much of her career at King’s College London, where she first undertook her PhD in the Microbiology Department, investigating virulence determinants in a putative oral pathogen, graduating in 2011. On completion of her PhD, she remained at King’s, working in Professor William Wade’s group investigating the role of bacteria in human oral diseases and developing novel methods to cultivate not-yet-cultivated oral bacteria, as part of the Human Oral Microbiome Database effort.

After a career break, Hayley re-joined King’s College London as a part-time Postdoctoral Researcher within the Centre for Host-Microbiome Interactions. Here she resumed her work attempting to cultivate not-yet-cultivated species of oral bacteria, with a specific focus on the candidate phyla radiation bacteria and worked with pharmaceutical companies testing novel anti-biofilm compounds on in-vitro biofilms, modelling the oral bacteriome.

In her PhD and post-doc positions, Hayley has gained extensive knowledge and experience in a variety of microbiological, molecular biology, immunological techniques, and high throughput sequencing techniques. The experience Hayley has acquired over her career at King’s will be utilized in the RodentGate project where she will be using a variety of molecular biology techniques and high throughput sequencing to investigate the presence and prevalence of pathogens in rodents and their potential spread to livestock on farms in the UK and across the EU.

Hayley’s research interests include the characterisation of microbiomes in disease and health using high throughput sequencing techniques, investigating microbial dark matter and the identification and characterisation of virulence determinants in pathogenic bacteria.