Rasika M. Harshey

Rasika Harshey is a Professor in the Molecular Biosciences Department at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas. She received her Ph.D. from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India.

Dr. Harshey's research program encompasses two very different areas of Microbiology. As a post-doctoral fellow at Cold Spring Harbor in Ahmad Bukhari's lab, she investigated the mechanism of transposition of phage Mu, and branched into studying various regulatory aspects of this mechanism first as an Asst Professor at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, and then as Associate and Full Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently using Mu a tool to study genome organization in bacteria. While in La Jolla, she discovered swarming motility first in Serratia marcescens, and after her move to Austin, in E. coli and Salmonella as well. She currently uses E. coli as a model to study various aspects of moving collectively on a surface, and survival strategies of bacteria within a swarm.