Summary
Dr Claire Stanley is a Lecturer (US equivalent: Assistant Professor) in the Department of Bioengineering at Imperial College London. Claire's research focuses on developing microfluidic or "Organ-on-a-Chip" technologies to probe the interplay between soil-dwelling organisms at the single cell level. This technique has a great potential to provide a unique view of biological events at the level of single organisms and cells by enabling precise environmental control, high-resolution dynamic imaging, the simulation of environmental complexity and affording quantitative information. We are involved in projects positioned at the interface between bioengineering, microbiology and plant biology, including the study of bacterial-fungal interactions at the single cell level, the defence response of fungi upon predation by nematodes and the adaptation of plant roots towards environmental asymmetry. More information can be found on her group website.
Before joining Imperial, Claire graduated from Durham University with a first class Honours degree (MChem). Here she received the Michael Weston Scholarship Award and successfully published a scientific paper in Chemical Communications (Chem. Commun., 2006, 3199-3201) detailing the research that she conducted on supramolecular organogels with Prof. Jonathan Steed. She then obtained an MRes in Protein and Membrane Chemical Biology (Distinction) and a PhD in Chemistry from Imperial College London. Whilst at Imperial, she was awarded the Sir Alan Fersht Prize for producing the best overall Masters thesis and a prestigious scholarship from the Society of the Chemical Industry.
Fascinated by microfluidics and wishing to deepen her knowledge in this area, Claire joined the group of Prof. Andrew deMello in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zürich, Switzerland as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow. In 2016, she was awarded a prestigious Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione career grant to start her own independent research team at Agroscope (Agroecology and Environment Research Division, Zürich Reckenholz) in the group of Prof. Marcel van der Heijden. Claire has raised more than £500k of research funding for grants she has written and contributed to additional successful grant applications worth >£7 million. She has also established a strong international network of collaborators in Switzerland, Europe and the USA.
Selected Publications
Journal Articles
Schmieder SS, Stanley CE, Rzepiela A, et al., 2019, Bidirectional propagation of signals and nutrients in fungal networks via specialized hyphae, Current Biology, Vol:29, ISSN:0960-9822, Pages:217-228.E4
Stanley CE, Shrivastava J, Brugman R, et al., 2018, Dual-flow-RootChip reveals local adaptations of roots towards environmental asymmetry at the physiological and genetic levels, New Phytologist, Vol:217, ISSN:0028-646X, Pages:1357-1369
Stanley CE, van der Heijden MGA, 2017, Microbiome-on-a-Chip: New Frontiers in Plant–Microbiota Research, Trends in Microbiology, Vol:25, ISSN:0966-842X, Pages:610-613
Stanley CE, Grossmann G, Casadevall i Solvas X, et al., 2016, Soil-on-a-Chip: microfluidic platforms for environmental organismal studies, Lab on a Chip, Vol:16, ISSN:1473-0197, Pages:228-241
Stanley CE, Stöckli M, van Swaay D, et al., 2014, Probing bacterial-fungal interactions at the single cell level., Integrative Biology, Vol:6, ISSN:1757-9694, Pages:935-945
Stanley CE, Elvira KS, Niu XZ, et al., 2010, A microfluidic approach for high-throughput droplet interface bilayer (DIB) formation, Chemical Communications, Vol:46, ISSN:1359-7345, Pages:1620-1622