Dr Ailsa MacCalman

Ailsa is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Nick Owens' lab. Her research focuses on investigating cis-regulatory changes across human pancreatic development and disease. Ailsa uses sequence changes in rare and common forms of pancreatic disease as a model to gain insight into genomic regulation across pancreatic development. Currently, Ailsa employs novel sequencing methods to investigate cooperative binding of transcription factors to understand chromatin accessibility.

In addition to this work, Ailsa utilises Oxford Nanopore direct RNA sequencing and single-cell long-read RNA sequencing to investigate transcriptomic and epitranscriptomic changes in the developing human pancreas. Her work currently aims to understand changes in RNA modifications, alternative splicing events and transcript isoform usage across development to provide novel insights into the regulation of pancreatic cell identity and function. 

Ailsa obtained her Master's degree investigating autoimmune responses in Type 1 Diabetes, following which she joined the University of Exeter in 2019 as a PhD student within the Complex Disease Epigenetics group. Ailsa was supervised by Professor Jon Mill, Dr Elisa De Franco, and Dr Aaron Jeffries, with collaborative support from Professor Andrew Hattersley and Professor Noel Morgan. Ailsa's PhD focused on characterising epigenetic and transcriptomic changes across human pancreatic development.