I started working with venomous snakes and venoms as a zookeeper at the Kentucky Reptile Zoo, one of the largest collections of venomous snakes in the USA. She then completed her PhD at the University of Northern Colorado, USA, where she characterised novel neurotoxins from understudied snake species and profiled venoms using a combination of high-throughput transcriptomics and proteomics. She spent five years as a post-doctoral research fellow at the National University of Singapore, continuing venom -omic work and expanding into vector biology, leveraging these same techniques to decipher mosquito immune responses to various pathogenic viruses. In 2021 she joined LSTM as part of the Centre for Snakebite Research and Interventions (CSRI).
Cassie’s research focuses primarily around the use of bioinformatics approaches to answer questions relating to gene expression and regulation in organisms associated with tropical diseases (e.g. venomous snakes, mosquitoes). She uses large datasets, such as those relating to differential gene expression and transcriptomes, to develop questions that can then be explored/tested in a laboratory setting.