Dr Cameron Baines completed his BSc in Microbiology at Nottingham Trent University under the supervision of Dr Gareth McVicker, with a research project focused on toxin-antitoxin plasmid maintenance systems in enteroinvasive Escherichia coli. This was followed by an MRes under Dr David Negus researching the therapeutic use of the predatory bacteria Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus to combat polymicrobial infections.
He achieved his PhD at the University of Nottingham under the guidance of Professor Neil Oldham in the field of structural and native mass spectrometry. He used covalent protein labelling to study the conformational dynamics of the bacterial protein EF-Tu when complexed with a range of antibiotics, alongside native and ion-mobility mass spectrometry to interrogate the stability of these complexes.
Cameron joined the Cooper group in November 2024 to work under the native ambient mass spectrometry (NAMS) project, with a focus of NAMS imaging. His research focuses on amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) where he uses nano desorption electrospray ionisation (nano-DESI) mass spectrometry imaging to characterise the spatial distributions of the causative misfolded SOD1 protein directly from brain tissue.