Dr Sarah du Plessis (she/her)

I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate working on the population genomics of serotine bats as hosts of European Bat Lyssavirus 1 (EBLV1). This work is funded by Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) through the Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) as a part of broader epidemiology and monitoring of EBLV1 in UK, led by Dr Orly Razgour.

More broadly, I am an evolutionary biologist specialising in population and conservation genomics, and an otter specialist, with expertise in whole-genome sequencing, bioinformatics pipelines, and degraded DNA analyses. I am passionate about understanding the genomic and phenotypic consequences of demographic changes, such as population bottlenecks, and how these influence extinction risk. In addition, I have experience in geometric morphometrics, both in generating high resolution CT scans (primarily of skulls across a range of speces), manual and automated landmarking methods to generate high resolution landmark data, and in statistical analyses of such large datasets.