Dr Claire Stanley is a Lecturer in Bioengineering at Imperial College London and has extensive experience in the development of novel microfluidic platforms for the life sciences. Claire's research predominantly focuses on developing "Organ-on-a-Chip" technologies to probe the interplay between soil-dwelling organisms, providing a unique view of biological events at the level of single organisms and cells by enabling precise environmental control, high-resolution dynamic imaging, the simulation of environmental complexity and affording quantitative information. She is involved in projects positioned at the interface between bioengineering, microbiology and plant biology, including the study of bacterial-fungal interactions at the single cell level, the defence response of fungi upon predation by nematodes and the adaptation of plant roots towards environmental asymmetry.
Before joining Imperial as a Lecturer, Claire graduated from Durham University with a first class Honours degree in Chemistry. She then obtained an MRes in Protein and Membrane Chemical Biology (Distinction) and a PhD in Chemistry from Imperial College London, where she was awarded the Sir Alan Fersht Prize and a prestigious scholarship from the Society of the Chemical Industry. Claire then joined the group of Prof. Andrew deMello in the Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering at ETH Zürich, Switzerland as a postdoctoral research fellow. In 2016, she was awarded a prestigious Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione career grant to start her own independent research team at Agroscope (Agroecology and Environment Research Division, Zürich Reckenholz) in the group of Prof. Marcel van der Heijden. Claire has raised more than £850k of research funding to support her research and contributed to additional successful grant applications worth >£17 million. She has also established a strong international network of collaborators in the UK, Switzerland, Europe and the USA.
