Summary
Michael is currently a Research Associate in the Freemont group working on the development of high throughput diagnostics. He is currently supporting the Imperial College Lighthouse and North West London Pathology (NHS) SARS-CoV-2 testing laboratories as the automation lead. He is also a part of the UK DRI Care Research and Technology Center focusing on developing point of care diagnostics. Apart from these projects he regularly collaborates with and mentors students from the Royal College of Art and organises workshops for the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) XY Module.
Biography
Dr Michael Crone transitioned into a research-orientated career after initially studying clinical medicine at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2015 he joined Professor Weinberg's group in the HIV Pathogenesis Research Laboratory at the University of the Witwatersrand where he focused on targeting HIV using CRISPR-Cas9. He continued working on RNA-guided DNA binding proteins, in particular Cas12a, at Imperial College London in Professor Paul Freemont's group, obtaining a Masters degree in Systems and Synthetic Biology funded as a Commonwealth Scholar.
Michael then went on to work for a year as a Research Assistant within the Freemont group, working on scarless genome engineering of bacteria and transcriptional and translational regulation in mammalian cells. In September of 2017, he started a PhD in Synthetic Biology at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne where he worked on characterising and engineering gene regulatory networks in S. cerevisiae.
Michael is currently a Research Associate in the Freemont group working on Low Cost Viral Diagnostics as a part of an EPSRC funded project, together with collaborators at the University of Cambridge, CSIR and University of Pretoria (South Africa). He is also a part of the UK DRI Care Research and Technology Center focusing on developing point of care diagnostics. Apart from these projects he regularly collaborates with and mentors students from the Royal College of Art and organises workshops for the Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) XY Module.
RNA guided endonucleases remain his prime interest and in the future he hopes to combine clinical knowledge and synthetic biology to develop novel diagnostics and therapeutics for clinical applications.
Education
MBBCh, University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)
MRes Systems and Synthetic Biology, Imperial College London
PhD Clinical Medicine Research, Imperial College London (in progress)
Publications
Journals
Crone MA, Hakki S, Fenn J, et al., 2024, Rapid emergence of transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants in mild community cases, Microbiology Spectrum, ISSN:2165-0497
Capstick A, Palermo F, Zakka K, et al., 2024, Digital remote monitoring for screening and early detection of urinary tract infections, Npj Digital Medicine, Vol:7, ISSN:2398-6352
Ren R, Cai S, Fang X, et al., 2023, Multiplexed detection of viral antigen and RNA using nanopore sensing and encoded molecular probes, Nature Communications, Vol:14, ISSN:2041-1723
Parkinson M, Doherty R, Curtis F, et al., 2023, Using home monitoring technology to study the effects of traumatic brain injury in older multimorbid adults, Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology, Vol:10, ISSN:2328-9503, Pages:1688-1694
Ramlaul K, Feng Z, Canavan C, et al., 2023, A 3D-printed flow-cell for on-grid purification of electron microscopy samples directly from lysate, Journal of Structural Biology, Vol:215, ISSN:1047-8477, Pages:1-12