Dr. Melody Clark - Profile
Contact Dr. Melody Clark
+44 (0)1223 221371
Biography
I am a Project Leader at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge for the Adaptations and Physiology Group. My overriding interest has always been genetics, the subject of my first degree. This was then followed by a somewhat chaotic career path, which has included chromosome screening for the NHS, a PhD localising genes onto barley chromomes, isolating and localising repeat sequences in dock plants (Rumex acetosa), date palms and potatoes (amongst others) and finally a move towards completely molecular work with the high-profile pufferfish genome project. I joined the British Antarctic Survey in August 2003 to develop their genomics expertise, as at the time very little was known about the DNA of Antarctic organisms. My initial work concentrated on the limited/non-existent heat shock response in marine invertebrates, but with the advent of Next Generation Sequencing has now expanded to understanding the whole transcriptome response of a range of Antarctic marine invertebrates. The species I work on include sea stars, urchins, brittle stars, shell fish and crustaceans, basically I need to be able to see it to sequence it, I haven't so far worked on the really small stuff or the big cute cuddly stuff!
