Gail grew up in Bolton, UK, where she was fascinated by the natural world from an early age. She was a first-generation university student who studied Natural Sciences, with a final year specialisation in Plant Sciences, at Christ's College, University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD in the Department of Plant Pathology at Cornell University, under the supervision of Prof. Alan Collmer, studying the virulence mechanisms of the plant pathogenic bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. She then returned to the UK to work as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Oxford with Prof. Paul Rainey, studying plant growth promoting pseudomonads. She was awarded a Weir Junior Research Fellowship by University College, Oxford and was subsequently awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship, which she held from 2001-2009.
Gail has a long-standing interest in interdisciplinary research and graduate education and in 2009 she was appointed as the Programme Director of the UKRI-EPSRC-funded Systems Biology Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Oxford. In 2012 she led the establishment of the UKRI-BBSRC-funded Oxford Interdisciplinary Bioscience Doctoral Training Partnership, an innovative graduate training programme which supports bioscience researchers across a wide range of disciplines. From 2024 onwards she has become the Director of the successor to the BBSRC DTP and NERC Environmental Research DTP - the BBSRC and NERC-funded Interdisciplinary Life and Environmental Science Landscape Award (ILESLA). She is committed to supporting equality, equity, diversity and inclusion and was involved in establishing the UNIQ+ graduate access research internship programme at the University of Oxford, for which she is the chair of the management committee. She is the co-director of the MPLS Doctoral Training Centre.
She served on the board of the British Society of Plant Pathology (BSPP) from 2020-2023 and in 2024 she was the President of the BSPP. She is a senior editor for Microbiology (published by the Microbiology Society), and has served as a committee member for UKRI-BBSRC. She is also a member of the International Committee for the International Conference on Pseudomonas syringae and related pathogens.
Her research focuses on the molecular interactions of plants and bacteria and how the environment inside and outside plants determines the outcome of plant-bacteria interactions. She also has an interest in bacterial interactions with cultivated mushrooms. Much of her work involves innovative, interdisciplinary collaborations that open up new approaches for studying plant-pathogen interactions.
She enjoys exploring the countryside and coastline, horse-riding, reading and listening to audiobooks, podcasts and music.
