Angelika Kiepas

PhD Candidate

Angelika was born and raised in a small town called Choszczno, in Poland. Little did she know, she will never return to her homeland after visiting Scotland during summer holidays back in 2012. Despite not knowing English, passion for science was her biggest motivation to learn the language, and Angelika obtained a BSc (Hons) in Biochemistry and Immunology from the University of Strathclyde in 2019. After this, Angelika completed her Master’s Degree in Industrial Biotechnology at Strathclyde in partnership with Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre (IBiolC), during which she realised that computational biology is the missing puzzle she was looking for.

During her Master’s, Angelika completed a 10-weeks project, working on genome mining of antiviral agents against SARS-CoV-2 in Streptomyces bacteria. Afterwords, in October 2020 she started her PhD studies (again at Strathclyde) and continued her joruney with Streptomyces under the supervision of Dr Leighton Pritchard and Prof Paul Hoskisson.

Angelika’s research uses pangenomics to aid discovery of novel antimicrobials in Streptomyces with the aim to help combat the crisis of antibiotic resistance. Angelika uses phylogenomics approaches to reclassify the entire genus of Streptomyces to improve basis for pangenomic and comparative genomic analyses, and to better understand the evolutionary genomics of this group.

Besides her reserach, Angelika enjoys to be involved in the community. She helped at Software Carpentries covering Unix Shell, Programming with Python and R, and OpenRefine, hosted by IBiolC.

Outside of work, Angelika is very likely in the gym powerlifting, at home watching crime documentaries or UFC, reading books or playing with her cats.

Education

Doctorate of Philosophy (PhD) in Bioinformatics
University of Strathclyde
Oct 2020 - Sept 2023

Master’s Degree in Industrial Biotechnology
Univeristy of Strathclyde
Industrial Biotechnology Innovation Centre
Sept 2019 - Sept 2020

Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Biochemistry and Immunology
Univeristy of Strathclyde
Sept 2015 - Jun 2019

Supervisors

  • Dr Leighton Pritchard (University of Strathclyde)
  • Prof Paul Hoskisson (Univeristy of Strathclyde)

Publications

Kiepas, Angelika B.; Hoskisson, Paul A.; Pritchard, Leighton (2022): Improved and extended multilocus sequence typing (MLST) scheme for Streptomyces reveals complex taxonomic structure. figshare. Poster. doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19615869.v1

Kiepas, Angelika B.; Hoskisson, Paul A.; Pritchard, Leighton (2022): Untangling the taxonomically complex genus of Streptomyces. figshare. Poster. doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20657157.v1

Email: angelika.kiepas@strath.ac.uk
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