Dr Michelle Johnson

I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Leeds, in the Women’s Health Research Group. I completed my PhD at The Open University with a thesis entitled ‘Gastrointestinal appetite hormones change with maternal adaptations to pregnancy and lactation in the rat’, supervised by Dr Vicky Taylor and Dr Jill Saffrey. This PhD project broadly addressed the sex bias in the existing literature, exploring the roles and effects of gut-derived appetite hormones. I currently work with Dr Nadia Gopichandran and Dr Nicolas Orsi in developing products to improve success rates of artificial reproduction in laboratory rodents (embryo transfer) and livestock (artificial insemination) with Ostara Biomedical. For mice, we are developing a controlled vaginal dosing system that stimulates superovulation, and a vaginal pessary system that delivers key factors required to create a permissive environment for embryo implantation in the uteri of prospective recipient females.

I’m a heavy metal fan, and love going to gigs in my spare time