Research Interests
I am a senior research associate with an interest in microbial functional genomics, in particular Klebsiella pneumoniae and other Enterobacteriaceae species (Salmonella Typhimurium, Enterobacter cloacae).
After graduating from the Technical University of Braunschweig/Germany, I joined the lab of Prof. Susanne Häussler at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research. During my PhD I used deep transcriptomic sequencing (RNA-seq) to study Antimicrobial Resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Klebsiella pneumoniae. This followed a short post-doc in the same group during which I developed rapid molecular diagnostics to detect hospital outbreaks and antibiotic resistance in several different bacterial species (mainly, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Escherichia coli and Clostridium difficile).
In 2017, I took up a post as a postdoctoral fellow in the Parkhill group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute using Functional Genomics (RNA-sequencing and transposon-directed insertion site sequencing, TraDIS) to understand the antimicrobial stress response in the Enterobacteriaceae species Klebsiella, Salmonella and Enterobacter.
In my current work at the Department of Veterinary Medicine I use different sequencing-based methods to learn how the human pathogen Klebsiella pneumoniae interacts with the immune system, in particular macrophages. This latter project is funded by an UKRI MRC Research Grant.