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Teaching StaffEveryone here teaches and gets wet
There is no research-only tier at Helix. Every member of academic staff runs practicals, walks the transect, and marks the work of students they have supervised in person.
Program 01
Dr Adaeze Mbeki
Came from a diagnostic sequencing service and rebuilt the program around reading traces critically rather than trusting the base call. Teaches the first-year codon block herself.
Dr Jarek Wisniewski
Inheritance, linkage and mapping. Insists students test predicted ratios against real counts, because real counts are almost never tidy.
Sunita Rao
Runs the sequencing suite and the extraction practicals. Responsible for the contamination protocol that the whole building now uses.
Program 02
Professor Henrik Nord
Thirty years at an eyepiece. Best known among students for the artefact seminar, in which he shows a slide of something that is not there and asks the room to describe it.
Dr Lucia Contreras
Membranes, transport and enzyme kinetics. Designs the physiology practicals so that something visibly fails before it visibly works.
Dele Adeyemi
Sterile technique, culture stocks and every safety sign-off in the building. No student reaches a bench without his signature.
Program 03 & the field network
Dr Moira Keane
Custodian of the Hollowmere series since 2003. Has walked the transect every year for twenty-three of them and can tell you which quadrat flooded in which decade.
Bram Terhorst
Runs the residential weeks and the station store. Responsible for the adapted transect protocol that lets the survey be run from an accessible route.
Dr Naomi Fielding
Teaches sampling and significance inside the practicals that need them, and runs the Tuesday drop-in for anyone whose data has stopped making sense.
Who arranges what
The placement office sits outside the four programs so that matching is driven by the student's interest and circumstances rather than by which program has capacity. Ruth Oyelaran has run it since 2016 and visits every new partner site before a student is sent there. Caspar Lindgren handles matching, travel and the hardship applications that go with them.
The ethics committee is chaired by Dr Lucia Contreras and includes two elected student members with full voting rights. It reviews every practical involving organisms annually and publishes its decisions to students each term, including refusals of staff proposals.
Availability
All teaching staff hold two open hours a week, posted on the program noticeboard, no appointment needed. Students also have a named tutor and a scheduled slot each fortnight.
Program heads take calls from applicants
If you want to know whether a route suits you, ask the person who runs it. The Institute office will arrange fifteen minutes.