What's Your Colyton Story?

Winner of the WH Pierce Prize in the Applied Microbiology International Awards 2022 for his research into low-cost amplicon sequencing methods which have been critical in outbreak responses to Ebola, Zika and the Covid-19 pandemic in which over 10 million genomes have sequenced. 

Josh is now a Fellow at the University of Birmingham developing novel methods for rapid antimicrobial resistance (AMR) prediction. He is a molecular biologist specialising in next-generation sequencing and has worked on both bacterial genomics and viral surveillance of outbreaks. He travelled in Guinea in West Africa and established the first mobile laboratory to perform viral surveillance during the West AfricanEbola virus epidemic. He also developed an amplicon-based sequencing method which has been widely used for Zika, Yellow fever, d++engue, chikungunya, Ebola virus and SARS-CoV-2.

Josh went to Southampton University, then after a spell in industry, moved to Birmingham to start a PhD in Biological Sciences in 2012. In 2019 he was awarded a seven-year fellowship to establish his own lab. The project OneAMR aims to develop rapid, portable genomics for the prediction of antibiotic resistance, a serious threat which has rendered many existing antibiotics ineffective. He chairs the sequencing working group for the COVID-19 Genomics UK Consortium, the world leaders in genomic surveillance of SARS-CoV-2.