I am a Research Scientist in the Microbes in the Food Chain (MFC) Institute Strategic Programme. My areas of expertise include Microbiology, Molecular Biology and Microbial Genomics and my role is to support the MFC with many different projects.

Prior to joining the institute, I was awarded a BSc in Biomedical Sciences from Brunel University, followed by an MRes in Infectious Diseases from St George’s University of London. I then achieved my PhD in Prof. Alan McNally’s lab at Nottingham Trent University. During my PhD, I studied the population structure of Escherichia coli from non-human environments, as well as Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, by combining genomic data with ecology to investigate the evolution of pathogenesis in these model organisms.

I started working at the Quadram Institute in 2019 as a Postdoc in the Juge group investigating mucin-derived sialic acid metabolism in gut bacteria and followed this up with a brief stint in the Narbad group, where I carried out biocide resistance testing of Listeria monocytogenes as part of the LINK project. In addition to these research projects, I have also worked as a RT-PCR Scientist for Anglia DNA Services.

Key Publications

2017 Seecharran T, Kalin-Manttari L, Koskela K, Nikkari S, Dickins B, Corander J, Skurnik M, McNally A. (2017) Phylogeographic Separation and Formation of Sexually Discrete Lineages in a Global Population of Yersinia pseudotuberculosis. Microb Genom 2017. doi: 10.1099/mgen.0.000133

2016 McNally A, Oren Y, Kelly D, Pascoe B, Dunn S, Seecharran T, et al. (2016) Combined Analysis of Variation in Core, Accessory and Regulatory Genome Regions Provides a Super-Resolution View into the Evolution of Bacterial Populations. PLoS Genet 12(9). doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1006280