Affiliation: 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.