Alison graduated from Bath
University with a BSc (Hons) in Applied Biology in 1989. She then went to work
in Berlin at the Institute Fur Genbiologishe Forschung on a project to
establish a gene tagging system in Arabidopsis using the maize transposon Ac.
In 1993 she moved to Barcelona to work at the Centro de Investigation y
Desarrollo as a research technician looking at the expression of late
embryogenesis genes in maize. In 1996 she returned to the UK to work as a
senior research technician at Horticulture Research International at
Wellesbourne on a research program manipulating the ABA pathway in tomato by
over expressing/knocking out key genes. From 2005 to 2021 Alison worked in Life
Sciences at Warwick University on a variety of projects. These included
research to enable the manipulation of flowering and development of a screen to
detect the end of juvenility in Antirrhinum and brassicas, characterising
resistance to Xanthomonas campestris in Brassica rapa by screening PCR based
molecular markers and looking at the occurrence of Fusarium pathogens in a
range of crops. She was involved in developing QPCR methods to identify, detect
and quantify levels of pathogen in soil.
Alison joined
Micropathology’s Virology team as a full-time postgraduate scientist in May
2021.