Pauline successfully defends PhD thesis

The newly minted Dr Pfuderer with examiners Professor Rob De Bruin (University College London) and Professor Florian Markowetz (University of Cambridge).

Many congratulations to Pauline Pfuderer who has successfully defended her PhD thesis entitled, "A neural network and genome language model based approach to understanding DNA replication in cancer". Pauline accomplished a large body of work during her time with us, including: Working with Julian Sale's lab to create the first map of replication fork movement and origin firing on extrachromosomal DNA, working with Sarah McClelland's lab on the effects of ATR inhibitors on sensitive and resistant breast cancer cell lines, and working with Mathew Jones's lab on the development of algorithms to detect replication fork stalling. She presented these results at scientific meetings around the world, from London to South Korea.

Pauline's team at the Merck Innovation Cup.

In addition to research, Pauline achieved a wide array of other accomplishments during her PhD. She was a fantastic mentor figure during her time with us and supervised our Part II student, Faye Lynch Williams, who went on to win the prize for highest scoring undergraduate research project in Part II Cancer Biology. She also participated in the Merck Innovation Cup in 2023 where her team won the runner-up prize as well as the BioSpark programme where she worked with Johnson & Johnson on light-activated drug molecules.

Pauline's PhD was funded by the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Centre, and we are very grateful to them and CRUK for funding and support. We are immensely proud of all that Pauline has accomplished. She will now go on to be a consultant at McKinsey & Company and we're excited to see the great work that she does next.