Research Interests:

Miguel Cámara completed his Fundamental Biology BSc (Hons) Degree at the Complutense University in Madrid (Spain) in 1988. He moved to the University of Leicester where he completed a Biotechnology Diploma in 1989 followed by his PhD in 1992. After two postdoctoral periods in the UK he was appointed as Lecturer in the School of Pharmacy at Nottingham University in 1996, to Senior Lecturer in 2002. In 2004 he moved to the School of Molecular Medical Sciences and in 2005 was promoted to Reader in Molecular Microbiology.

Since 1994 he has been working on the molecular biology behind the global coordination of gene expression in bacterial populations through quorum sensing. The main organisms he is currently working on are Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Yersinia species in which quorum sensing is reaching a high level of complexity as a result of the vast gathering of information from microarray studies. To understand how quorum sensing cascades integrate with the different regulatory networks within cells he interested in the analysis of genomic, proteomic and metabolomic responses of some of these bacteria to environmental changes. He is also interested in the signaling between bacteria and eukaryotic organisms in both the human host and marine environments. His ultimate aim is to identify novel antibacterial targets that can be exploited to treat from infectious diseases to marine biofouling.

Since his appointment at Nottingham University he has supervised more than 20 PhD students in the area of quorum sensing. His research is funded by the European Union, BBSRC, NERC, The Welcome Trust and industry. He is currently coordinator for an EU Marie Curie Early Stages of Training Network ANTIBIOTARGET. He is an editor for FEMS Microbiology Reviews, a member of the of the Society for General Microbiology's Physiology, Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics Group and a member of the University of Nottingham European Research Strategy Group. In 2001 he won a Lord Dearing Award for Teaching and Learning at the University of Nottingham. He is a teaching assessor for the Postgraduate Certificate in Higher Education at Nottingham and external examiner at the University of Salford.

Links:

School of Molecular Medical Science, Yersinia page, Pseudomonas page

Publications