Micon Garvilles

Micon Garvilles completed her MSc in Pharmacology at the University of Oxford in 2020. Micon then continued her PhD in the Coles/Buckley and Bezbradica labs at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology in the Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences. She is supervised by Professor Mark Coles, Professor Christopher Buckley and Professor Jelena Bezbradica Mirkovic. Her work focuses on investigating the biology of chloride ion channel CLIC5 in fibroblasts in health and disease in the context of arthritis. In collaboration with Bezbradica lab and drawing on their expertise on macrophage biology and NLRP3 inflammasomes, Micon played a key role in developing high-throughput drug screening assays for small-molecule inhibitors. Micon works at the intersection of immunology and drug discovery.

Before Oxford, she held a scientist role at Taconic Biosciences, a biotech company specialising in animal models for research and drug development in New York, USA. As part of the Special Testing and Assay transfer group, she led projects that used robotics and automation to enhance quality testing in the Molecular Analysis Lab. Micon received honours in her bachelor’s degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), New York. She completed a combined degree in Biotechnology and Molecular Bioscience and Biomedical Science with a minor specialisation in Spanish Language. At RIT, she researched the biology of Vesicular Stomatitis Virus in the lab of Dr Maureen Ferran, and was one of the few students that successfully generated hybridomas and a vaccine in the advanced immunology lab of Dr David Lawlor.

Micon is a registered yoga teacher and founder of the Lincoln Yoga and Meditation Community. She has been teaching yoga and meditation since 2016, and is passionate about mindfulness and working on ways to give back to the community.