Dr Modupeh Betts

University of Liverpool

Modupeh comes from Gambia with many years of experience as a research assistant at the MRC Unit The Gambia (MRCG) at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, a leading African research institute in infectious diseases. His work at MRCG mainly focused on the molecular characterisation of pathogens relevant to public health, such as Streptocococcus pneumoniae. He also worked in nutritional epigenetics and guided field studies at MRCG. Modupeh obtained a first-class BSc (Hons) Biomedical Science degree from Kingston University in 2013. He went on to obtain a MSc Bioinformatics with distinction from Queen Mary University in 2017. He was recently awarded a MPRU PhD studentship that is fully funding his studies at University College London in bacterial transcriptomics with Robert Heyderman in the Division of Infection and Immunity.

Modupeh's PhD work was on leveraging next generation sequencing and bioinformatics techniques to gain deeper insights into the mechanisms underlying Streptococcus pneumoniae infection and colonisation.

Modupeh graduated in 2022 and is now a postdoctoral researcher position at the University of Liverpool.

Links to selected publications:

1) Betts M, Jarvis S, Jeffries A, Gori A, Chaguza C, et al. 2021. Complete genome sequence of Streptococcus strain BVJ1JL, a serotype 1 carriage isolate from Malawi. Microbial Resour Announc 10:e0071521.

2) Silver MJ, Saffari A, Kessler NJ, Chandak GR, ... , Betts M, et al. 2019. Environmentally sensitive hotspots in the methylome of the early human embryo.  BioRxiv doi: https://dx.doi.org/10.1101/777508.

3) Armitage AE, Agbla SC, Betts M, et al. 2019. Rapid growth is a dominant predictor of hepcidin suppression and declining ferritin in Gambian infants. Haematologica 104(8):1542-53.