Kevin Whitley

Principal Investigator

Originally from St. Louis, Missouri (USA). After high school, Kevin couldn’t decide whether he liked biology or chemistry more (although leaned toward chemistry), so he chose to study biochemistry at the University of Arizona for a BSc. He worked in research labs all 4 years of his degree (federal work-study program, later a scholarship), mostly in Michael Cusanovich’s lab studying the mechanism of electron transport through cytochrome bc1 complex.

While an undergraduate, he realized that physics is actually really cool too, and so he pursued a PhD in biophysics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (home of HAL9000!). He worked in Yann Chemla’s lab using optical tweezers and single-molecule fluorescence to investigate both the elasticity of nucleic acids at ‘ultrashort’ length scales and the mechanisms of the DNA-unwinding motor proteins called helicases.

After living in the middle of corn and soybean fields for 7 years(!), he was (very) ready for a change. He moved across the Atlantic to work as a postdoc shared between the labs of Cees Dekker (TU Delft, Netherlands) and Séamus Holden (Newcastle University, UK) to expand his single-molecule work into living cells. He investigated the molecular mechanism of bacterial cell division in the model species Bacillus subtilis while developing new methods for studying bacteria using nanofabrication, microfluidics, and advanced microscopy.

In 2022, Kevin was hired as a Lecturer (i.e. Assistant Professor) by Newcastle University to set up his own lab investigating bacterial biophysics. Staff profile

Current lab members

Rebecca Diss

Postdoc

Rebecca started her academic career at Imperial College London where she obtained a BSc in Biochemistry followed by an MRes in Molecular & Cellular Biosciences. During her masters, she used microfluidics and fluorescence microscopy to study how bacteria use fungal hyphae as highways in heterogenous soil environments.

She then moved to the John Innes Centre in Norwich for her PhD in the lab of Dr Susan Schlimpert where she studied Actinobacterial cell division using Mycobacterium smegmatis as a model.

She is now a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Whitley Lab where she is using Expansion Microscopy to study cell envelope biogenesis in the Mycobacteriales.

In her spare time Rebecca likes caving, trail running and other outdoor pursuits.

Jonathan Mitchell

PhD student

Jonathan is originally from Sunderland (UK) and moved down the North of England to start his MBiolSci degree in Biochemistry and Microbiology at the University of Sheffield (UK). As an undergraduate, he started to get a taste for the wonderful world of microscopy during his first research project in Professor Per Bullough's lab, using cryo-transmission electron microscopy to gather a predicted structure of bacteriophage from Clostridioides difficile.

During Jonathan’s integrated master’s project, he worked in Dr. Ian Lidbury’s lab (University of Sheffield, UK), exploring polysaccharide turnover in plant-associated Flavobacterium spp. He found the microbial genetics in this project very cool and wanted to carry this into his future research.

So, in 2023, Jonathan started as a PhD student in the Whitley lab (Newcastle University, UK). He is currently investigating how cell wall synthases build the cell wall in pole-growing bacteria at the single-molecule level, using Corynebacterium glutamicum as a model. For this, he applies some of the advanced microscopy techniques developed by Kevin Whitley and microbial genetics.

In his spare time, he likes to watch and play pretty much any sport and has played guitar since he was little.