About me

I'm a PhD student at The University of Manchester working in the Papalopulu Lab. My project is about understanding how stem cells in the developing spinal cord decide when and where to differentiate and produce neurons. Expression of a gene involved in this decision process is Hes5, which is expressed in a stripey/clustered pattern in the developing spinal cord. I use a combination of computational modelling and experimental work to understand how this patterned expression forms, and how it affects the timing and spreading out of differentiating neurons.

I really enjoy simulating and visualising models of systems with emergent properties, where individual particles or cells have a defined set of rules for interaction with each other, and subsequent population level behaviour emerges. My PhD project is an example of this type of system, and all the simulations you find on this website are examples of such systems too.

Contact

Personal:   joshhawley369@gmail.com

Work:   joshua.hawley@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

Publications

Doostdar, P., Hawley, J., Marinopoulou, E., Lea, R., Biga, V., Papalopulu, N., & Soto, X. (2022). Cell coupling compensates for changes in single-cell Her6 dynamics and provides phenotypic robustness. bioRxiv.

Hawley, J., Manning, C., Biga, V., Glendinning, P., & Papalopulu, N. (2022). Dynamic switching of lateral inhibition spatial patterns. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 19(193), 20220339.

Biga, V., Hawley, J., Soto, X., Johns, E., Han, D., Bennett, H., … & Papalopulu, N. (2021). A dynamic, spatially periodic, micro-pattern of HES5 underlies neurogenesis in the mouse spinal cord. Molecular systems biology, 17(5), e9902.

Seminar talk

Posters

Poster presented at EMBL Biological Oscillator conference in Heidelberg in 2022, which won a poster prize.

Poster presented at the Theory of Living Matter conference in Cambridge 2019, which won a poster prize.