Professor Eamonn Mallon

Supervisor Details

Contact Details

Scientific Background

Research Interests

Epigenetics is defined as the heritable change in expression of a gene without any change in the DNA sequence. Everything we do - diet, habitat, social interactions, even aging - causes chemical modifications on genes that will turn those genes on or off: epigenetic changes. Many diseases including cancer and Alzheimer's show epigenetic changes between the normal or healthy state.

Professor Mallon鈥檚 group research epigenetics in insects, mainly bumblebees and wasps. This is done both as a model of more complicated systems, e.g. humans, and because of insects鈥� importance to humanity鈥檚 survival. For example, insect pollination services are worth 14.2 billion euros to Europe's economy.

Scientific Inspiration

Thomas Huxley. He came from a much more deprived background than his scientific peers, yet through talent and work made a contribution to knowledge.

Research Groups

Supervision Style

In three words or phrases: Work-life balance. Always focussed on the student鈥檚 scientific career. Making the path the goal.

Provision of Training

Initially we will look to see where formal training can fill any holes in your knowledge. After that, the PhD will give you the most important skill, how to develop yourself.

Progression Monitoring and Management

Its your PhD. I have weekly lab meetings, but these are to help iron out problems not as a check on your progression against some arbitrary goal.

Fundamentally, I want you to feel that a good day鈥檚 work is success, no matter the outcome. Allowing yourself to only be content when experiments work, will lead to a lot of discontent.

Communication

A quick email or dropping into my office can usually get a meeting that day or at the latest the next day. I tend not to check my email after 6 or on the weekends, so you should not get emails from me outside of work hours (although I do start early!)

PhD Students can expect scheduled meetings with me:

In a group meeting

At least once per week

In year 1 of PhD study

At least once per fortnight

In year 2 of PhD study

At least once per month

In year 3 of PhD study

At least once per month

These meetings will be a mixture of face to face, via video chat or telephone, and I am usually contactable for an instant response on every working day.

Working Patterns

The timing of work in my lab is completely flexible, and (other than attending pre-arranged meetings), I expect students to manage their own time.

Notice Period for Feedback

I need at least 1 week鈥檚 notice to provide feedback on written work of up to 5000 words.

MIBTP Project Details

Primary supervisor for:

Turning Back the Epigenetic Clock: How Diet and Metabolism Reprogram Ageing

See the PhD Opportunities section to see if this project is currently open for applications via MIBTP.

Please Note: The main page lists projects via BBSRC Research Theme(s) quoted and then relevant Topic(s).

Turning Back the Epigenetic Clock: How Diet and Metabolism Reprogram Ageing

Secondary Supervisor(s): Dr Ko-Fan Chen, Dr Richard Hopkinson

University of Registration: University of Leicester

BBSRC Research Themes:

Integrated Understanding of Health (Ageing)

Project Outline

Can diet and metabolism genuinely slow the pace of ageing, not just extend life but reprogram the biological clock that measures it? This project puts you at the centre of one of the most exciting open questions in ageing biology, using epigenetic clocks, the most accurate biomarker of biological age currently available, to find out.

Numerous drugs have already been shown to extend lifespan in mice and slow their epigenetic clocks. What's still unknown is how: do these compounds work by directly reprogramming the epigenome, or through separate metabolic routes that only look connected? Answering that question demands a model where lifespan and epigenetic change can both be tracked fast and at scale, something mammalian systems simply can't offer.

That's where Nasonia vitripennis, the jewel wasp, comes in. It combines the short generation time and experimental tractability of an invertebrate with genuine mammalian-like DNA methylation, making it a uniquely powerful system for dissecting epigenetic ageing at pace. You'll work with an established high-throughput pipeline for lifespan and healthspan assays, Oxford Nanopore sequencing for base-resolution DNA methylation, and CUT&Tag for histone marks, testing whether interventions shift both lifespan and the rate of epigenetic ageing. You'll then apply advanced statistical and machine learning methods to build and refine epigenetic clocks directly from your own data.

This is frontier ageing research with real translational stakes: the tools and findings you generate will help establish new invertebrate models for anti-ageing drug discovery, a field currently starved of fast, scalable systems. If you're drawn to big mechanistic questions, want to work at the cutting edge of genomics technology, and want your PhD to produce results with a real shot at shaping the future of healthy ageing, this project will give you the model system, the tools, and the training to make that happen.

Co-supervisor on a project with Dr Hollie Marshall.

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Midlands Integrative Biosciences Training Partnership