Work in progress website, but the publications page is ready!
I am an experimental researcher specialising in phage-bacteria evolutionary interactions, currently employed as a postdoc in the research group of Carolin Wendling at the Max von Pettenkofer Institut, LMU Munich, Germany. My expertise is in combining experimental evolution, molecular biology, and bioinformatics to answer fundamental questions in phage-bacteria evolution. I am better found at bluesky , link at the header or footer
During my PhD at the research group Microbial Molecular Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, I investigated how antibiotics influence (lytic) phage resistance evolution. Passionate about science communication, I have lectured (Öffentliche Vortrag) in German and English, as well as to high school students. With a strong interdisciplinary background and experience across four continents, I am committed to contribute to inclusive, collaborative science.
I was intrigued by antibiotic resistance research when studying for my bachelor’s in biotechnology and biochemical engineering at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, India. Dr. Amrita Hazra’s passion for science and the fun I had working with her at Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Pune, India in summer 2017 spurred me on the scientific path. I worked with Prof. Christian Baron at Université de Montréal, Canada on the inhibition of the Type IV secretion system of Helicobacter pylori in summer 2018. In summer 2019, I interned with Dr. Frederic Bertels at Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. Jordan Romeyer Dherbey and I worked on the experimental evolution of bacteriophage PhiX174, and I fell in love with the process of scientific research and the rigorous methods that scientists apply to test their hypothesis. My master’s thesis was to decipher the source of gene expression noise in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, with Dr. Riddhiman Dhar (IIT Kharagpur) as my supervisor.
I will soon add links to my medium blog posts about academia
I will also add links to my outreach on diversity in academia, my preprints, and updates on projects of my undergraduate students!
🗞️ Updates:
- Lisa Riederauer started her master’s internship! She will work with me on characterising four temperate phages (September 2025)
- Presented at the EMBL Conference Concepts in Microbiology
- Megan Guest started her master’s internship at our lab! She will work with me on experimental evolution of lysogeny (March 2025)
- Started a new job as a postdoc at LMU Munich
- Wrote a bsky thread for Chloramphenicol paper (add link). Converted into a blog post here (add link)
- 📜 New paper, finally out! Chloramphenicol and gentamicin reduce the evolution of resistance to phage ΦX174 by suppressing a subset of E. coli LPS mutants at PLOS Bio.
- 💬 Invited for a presentation at LMU Munich. Might join for a postdoc there!
- 📜 New paper: A more significant role for insertion sequences in large-scale rearrangements in bacterial genomes at mbio.
- 📜 New pre-print: Chloramphenicol reduces phage resistance evolution by suppressing bacterial cell surface mutants.
- 📜 New pre-print: Empirical evidence of a role for insertion sequences in the repair of DNA breaks in1 bacterial genomes intern graudated…? blogs link book club list school presentation