Georgina Brennan

I have a strong interest in ecology and how environmental changes shape populations at the phenotypic and molecular level. I strongly believe in multidisciplinary research, bringing together molecular, ecological, experimental and modelling tools in order to best answer the question at hand.

My current research, uses genomic approaches, such as metagenomics, metabarcoding and real-time PCR to assess biodiversity and composition of aerial grass pollen at the species level. This work is carried out at the Molecular Ecology and Fisheries Genetics Laboratory (MEFGL) at Bangor University, in collaboration with PollerGEN. PollerGEN is an interdisciplinary project funded by NERC which uses molecular ecology, genomic approaches and ecological modelling of grass pollen to identify aerial pollen at the species level, measure abundance and use this information to understand the relationship between grass pollen and asthma incidence across the UK.

Previously, I completed a degree in Biology at the Royal Holloway, University of London in 2009, and a Masters degree in 2011, at Queen’s University Belfast. For my Master's thesis I examined the impact of the complex hydrodynamic environments on dispersal, how this structures populations of the seaweed Laminiaria digigtaa and the consequences to gene flow.

In 2016, I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh. This research explored the effect of multiple environmental changes on a green alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, in order to understand how green algae, such as phytoplankton in the oceans, will respond to multiple environmental changes predicted under future global change scenarios.