Human Frontier Science Program Postdoctoral Fellowship awarded to Dr. Alexandra Bessenay

Dr. Alexandra Bessenay, postdoctoral researcher in the Barabas group, has been awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Human Frontier Science Program for her project entitled “Parasite or symbiont: transposon host interactions in bacteria”. With support of this competitive fellowship, Alexandra will explore how selfish genomic parasites become useful symbionts of bacterial cells and communities. 

She brings her expertise in computational genomics and transcriptomics to expand the Barabas Lab’s structural and microbiology approach in understanding transposon biology. Integrating global and mechanistic insights, her research will discern the regulatory mechanisms and evolutionary trajectory of transposon-host interactions, with the aim to discover how mobile genetic elements can turn into effective workhorses of cellular adaptation, genome evolution and antibiotic resistance dissemination.

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