Naomi Dyer has a BA in natural sciences (University of Cambridge, 2002) specialising in zoology. Her PhD focused on cell division in fruit flies at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. In 2007 she joined Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) for postdoctoral research with Martin Donnelly on the phylogenetics and population genetics of tsetse flies, followed by postdocs with Mark Paine on developing novel pyrethroid insecticides, and with Alvaro Acosta-Serrano on the relationship between tsetse flies and the sleeping sickness parasite Trypanosoma brucei. She took a career break for caring reasons in 2014, returning to LSTM in 2021 to research the cis-regulation of gene expression in anopheles gambiae with a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council funded Daphne Jackson Fellowship. Naomi is now a lecturer and Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow investigating the evolution of gene expression as an adaptation to gain insecticide resistance.

She combines her research which is part time with ongoing caring responsibilities and public communication of science. As well as gene expression evolution Naomi loves to talk about and support others with return to research after a career break, effective flexible working and being both researcher and carer.

Naomi is fascinated by evolution and the process of how a single fertilised egg gives rise to a complex organism. Although every cell in an organism contains the same genome, different cell types have very different properties, because of which genes are expressed. Most of the eukaryotic genome does not encode genes, and there is no simple code for non-coding DNA function. Despite thousands of sequenced genomes, we can’t read a genome and work out which genes will be expressed at what level in each cell, or predict the impacts of non-coding mutations on complex traits. Naomi’s research aims to investigate how non coding regulatory DNA regulate gene expression in disease vectors such as mosquitoes, and how this changes during the evolution of insecticide resistance. The ultimate goal is to use this information on gene regulation to improve tools for vector surveillance and control.

Naomi is currently working on two projects with research assistant Ilona Flis. The first is looking at evolution of mosquito gene expression as an adaptation to gain insecticide resistance. Combining information on tissue specific gene expression, chromatin accessibility and epigenetic markers, they are building a picture of tissue specific gene regulation in the malaria vector anopheles gambiae, in collaboration with Elena Gómez-Díaz, Marc Halfon and Tony Nolan.

The second project is examining a cell atlas of anopheles coluzzii malpighian tubules. With support from LSTM Director’s Catalyst Fund, they are using single cell ribonucleic acid sequencing and single cell multiomics to create a cell atlas of gene expression in mosquito renal system.