Clara completed her bachelor’s degree in biology and her master’s degree in microbiology and immunology at ETH Zurich, Switzerland. She spent her third year of studies at Imperial College London as part of an Erasmus exchange programme. Clara obtained her PhD from Aix-Marseille University, France, during which she studied the regulation and metabolism linked to the degradation of the plant polysaccharide xyloglucan by the soil saprophyte Ruminiclostridium cellulolyticum.

Project

Clara is a postdoctoral fellow working with Prof. Michael Prentice and Prof. Mark Tangney. She is investigating bacterial microcompartments, proteinaceous polyhedral structures which evolved to separate specialist metabolic enzymes in bacteria from the cytoplasm, for use in synthetic biology and anti-cancer therapy.