Dr Martin Day
I studied for my first degree in Applied Biology, at what is now Hatfield University in Hertfordshire, between 1966 and 1971. After graduation I moved to research for my PhD at University College, London. Here I was the last in the line of PhD students looking at an aliphatic amidase in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. My aim was to map its chromosomal location and to continue the study into the way it evolves. I graduated and joined, in 1975, the newly formed Biology Department in the University of Warwick, as a post doctoral researcher, where I spent nearly two years looking for mutants effecting growth patterns in the photosynthetic prosthecate Rhodomicrobium vanelli.
I then moved to Cardiff in 1978, where I my research interests have focussed into asking how and why microbes, as individuals and in natural populations and communities, evolve in the ways they do? This means the results of the work provide a base line for those transfer events that occur in nature. An understanding of the events that contribute to success and failure of a microbe makes a contribution to the debate over the use of recombinant organisms in biotechnology.