Souvik Bhattacharyya

University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Tx, USA

As a microbial ethologist, Dr. Bhattacharyya’s research focuses on how different aspects of bacterial behavior can affect the evolution of antimicrobial resistance. He takes interdisciplinary approaches involving molecular biology, genetics, biochemistry, evolution, data analysis, ethology, and mathematical modeling to study several aspects of AMR. Currently, he is a ‘Provost Early Career Fellow’ in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin under the supervision of Prof. Rasika Harshey and Dr. Despoina Mavridou. His postdoctoral work here has led to three key findings. First, he discovered ‘necrosignaling’, where bacterial cells killed by antibiotics release a danger signal for the live cells. In his second project, he discovered the phenomenon of ‘phenotype surfing,’ where he showed how antibiotic resistant mutants can survive elimination in a dense population. In his third project, he discovered that E. coli cells have a deterministic memory that affects their ability of antibiotic tolerance. For his doctoral studies, he worked under the supervision of Prof. Umesh Varshney at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India. His research focused on eubacterial protein synthesis to show why methionine evolved to be the first amino acid in a protein.

Tiffany Zarrella

National Cancer Institute

Dr. Tiffany Zarrella is a PRAT fellow in the lab of Dr. Anupama Khare at the National Cancer Institute where she studies polymicrobial interactions between the co-infecting bacterial pathogens Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Staphylococcus aureus, which often cause chronic, antibiotic resistant infections. She is elucidating the environmental conditions and molecular mechanisms that govern interbacterial communication and modulate antimicrobial production and resistance. Understanding these underlying molecular pathways in interspecies interactions will lead to the identification of novel targets for therapeutics that disrupt chronic bacterial infections. Dr. Zarrella earned her Ph.D. at Albany Medical College in the laboratory of Guangchun Bai where she researched the role of the bacterial signaling nucleotide cyclic di-AMP in controlling stress responses and competence in the pathogen Streptococcus pneumoniae.  

Nikol Kaderabkova

The University of Texas at Austin, TX, USA

Dr. Kaderabkova is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. Despoina Mavridou’s lab in the Department of Molecular Biosciences at The University of Texas at Austin. During her doctoral work at the Imperial College London, they have shown that oxidative protein folding is critical to the functionality of numerous antimicrobial resistance (AMR) determinants. Disruption of native disulfide bonds in b-lactamase enzymes and mobile colistin resistance proteins allows re-sensitizations of Gram-negative pathogens to previously unusable antibiotics. Her current research builds on this work with three main aims: (i) to expand our understanding of how the oxidative protein folding supports the evolution of b-lactamase enzymes and thus b-lactam resistance, (ii) to unravel the nuances behind these resistance mechanisms with the aim to clarify cross-resistance or cross-sensitivities with other potential antimicrobials, and (iii) to identify the sources and underlying mechanisms that support the dissemination of functional and potential resistance proteins across bacterial species. To address these aims, she combines experimental evolution, molecular biology, and microbiology to build robust protocols in model laboratory strains and transfer the acquired knowledge to study resistance in clinical isolates associated with chronic multidrug resistant communities.

Stuti Desai

University of Texas, Medical Branch

Dr. Desai is fascinated by how pathogens exist in different forms to survive and replicate in often fluctuating host and non-host environments. Her research focuses on understanding the genetic and signaling events that enable the enteric pathogen, Salmonella enterica to shift between virulent and dormant lifestyles. In her postdoctoral work, she unraveled that atypical signaling by a virulence master regulator drives the expression of a central pathway involved in forming sessile Salmonella communities, or biofilms. Salmonella biofilms are necessary for persistence and carriage in asymptomatic patients. In fact, in chronic Salmonella infections, biofilms are formed on gallstones in the gallbladder, increasing the frequency of developing hepatobiliary carcinomas. She is now excited to harness this expertise at UTMB in biomedical sciences to unravel the mechanisms of lifestyle changes in more aggressive strains of Salmonella and understand how it drives asymptomatic chronic infections. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly put a ‘spotlight’ on the dangerous role of asymptomatic infections in spreading human pathogens.