Staff profile

STEM Career returner

After a 12-year break from research, raising my son, and working in Education, I returned to research in 2016 with the help of a Daphne Jackson Trust Fellowship sponsored by the Biochemical Society.

A subsequent 3-year BBSRC research grant, as co-investigator with Prof Keith Lindsey, established the contribution of the Meristem Defective gene, a splicing factor, to root meristem development in Arabidopsis.

Following a period as a Teaching Fellow, I became an Assistant Professor in the Education team of the Biosciences Department in 2022.

My current research interests are focused on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on Education and the accessibility of assessment types to diverse groups of Bioscience undergraduates, with a particular interest in the International student cohort.

• My research interests lie in exploring further the role of pre-mRNA splicing in plant genomes to regulate gene expression.

Journal Article

• Thompson, H., Shen, W., Matus, R., Kakkar, M., Jones, C., Dolan, D., …Lindsey, K. (2023). MERISTEM-DEFECTIVE regulates the balance between stemness and differentiation in the root meristem through RNA splicing control. Development, 150(7), Article dev201476. https://doi.org/10.1242/dev.201476
• Auricchio, A., Griseri, P., Carpentieri, M., Betsos, N., Staiano, A., Tozzi, A., …Ceccherini, I. (1999). Double heterozygosity for a RET substitution interfering with splicing and an EDNRB missense mutation in Hirschsprung disease. American Journal of Human Genetics, 64, 1216-1221. https://doi.org/10.1086/302329
• Martucciello, G., Thompson, H., Mazzola, C., Morando, A., Bertagnon, M., Negri, F., …Jasonni, V. (1998). GDNF deficit in Hirschsprung's disease. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-3468%2898%2990371-2
• Thompson, H., Thompson, H., Schmidt, R., & Dean, C. (1996). Identification and distribution of seven classes of middle-repetitive DNA in the Arabidopsis thaliana genome. https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/24.15.3017
• Thompson, H., Thompson, H., Schmidt, R., & Dean, C. (1996). Analysis of the occurrence and nature of repeated DNA in an 850 kb region of Arabidopsis thaliana chromosome 4. Plant Molecular Biology, 32, 553-557. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00019109
• Thompson, H., Thompson, H., Schmidt, R., Brandes, A., Heslop-Harrison, J., & Dean, C. (1996). A novel repetitive sequence associated with the centromeric regions of Arabidopsis thaliana chromosomes. https://doi.org/10.1007/s004380050319
• Schmidt, R., West, J., Love, K., Lenehan, Z., Lister, C., Thompson, H., …Dean, C. (1995). Physical map and organization of Arabidopsis thaliana chromosome 4. Science, 270, 480-483. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.270.5235.480
• Thompson, H., Edwards, K., Thompson, H., Edwards, D., de Saizieu, A., Sparks, C., …Schuch, W. (1992). Construction and characterisation of a yeast artificial chromosome library containing three haploid maize genome equivalents. Plant Molecular Biology, 19, 299-308. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00027351