Will Claydon
Will Claydon is a Master’s by Research student in the Ezer lab who has a fascination with plants, to which we are dependent on for food, medicine and oxygen. Will’s work is a collaborative endeavour between the department of Biology at the University of York, a local vertical farm called, GrowitYork and a lighting company called, Vertically Urban who supply the lights that Will and GrowitYork will be using.
The first goal of Will’s project is to design an artificial sunrise which can used to grow micro herbs within GrowitYork and improve their biomass. The second goal of Will’s project is to look at how artificial sunrises impact the growth of certain mutant lines of Arabidopsis thaliana which relate to an early morning gene network, which controls photomorphogenesis.
Will received his undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Dundee in 2022, this is where will discovered his interest in Plant Biology and where he gained valuable research skills in Good Laboratory Practice (GLP), data analysis, microbiology and plant pathogenesis. Will hopes to contribute to the Ezer lab by creating protocols on how to grow and image micro herbs as well as developing a protocol within the lab on how to keep a lab book to industry standard.
By the end of his project, Will hopes to have done some demonstrating in undergraduate modules, Developed skills in microbiology, computational biology and fluorescence imaging. When Will isn’t in the lab he like’s to be surrounded by plants on long walks or in the kitchen baking.