THE BAKSHI Laboratory of Systems and Synthetic Microbiology
We are a team of scientists and engineers interested in using experiments and modelling to examine and engineer microbes for fundamental and applied purposes. We collaborate with several other labs within the University of Cambridge and across the world to work on these problems together. Links to their websites and information about joining us are provided in the resource page.
PI
Somenath Bakshi (Google Scholar)
Assistant Professor (January 2019 - )
Postdoctoral research, Harvard University (September 2014 - Nov 2018)
PhD, University of Wisconsin Madison (December 2013)
Email: somenath.bakshi@eng.cam.ac.uk Phone: +44 1223 3 32753
Tech Support
Narges Khadem Hosseini
Narges is a Senior Technician in Biological laboratories. She provides technical support for the students.
Email: nk616@cam.ac.uk Phone: +44 1223748509
Postdocs/ Research Associates
Alma Wu
Alma is a postdoc in synthetic biology. She completed her PhD at the University of Sydney in 2023, focusing on antibiotic resistance plasmids, and now works on engineering stable genetic circuits on both plasmids and chromosomes for therapeutic applications.
Email: ayw32@cam.ac.uk
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Alma-Wu
PhD Students
Georgeos Hardo
Georgeos is 4th year PhD student in Biological Sciences (Systems & Synthetic Biology) from BBSRC DTP programme. his current research is about Image analysis tools for high throughput single cell microscopy, and using these tools to study bacterial dormancy.
Charlie Wedd
Charlie is the 3rd year PhD student from EPSRC Sensor CDT programme. His work is on bacterial fitness and characterising the bacteriophage infection cycle using single cell time lapse microscopy.
Email: cdw42@cam.ac.uk
Graduate Students
Jake Gozdziewski
Jake was an MPhil student from the Biotechnology programme. He is developing models to explore how microbes age and quantifying signatures of aging in model microbes (E. coli and B. subtilis) using timelapse fluorescence microscopy.
Eva Chatry
Eva is a Mphil student in biotechnology. She is interested in the photophysics of fluorescent proteins, in particular, the assessment of maturation and bleaching rates to enable the screening and engineering of fast-maturing proteins.
Email: ejmc2@cam.ac.uk
Yuan Han
Yuan is a graduand Master's student doing a summer research funded by Mathworks. His research is about finalizing the adaptive segmentation pipeline he developed in his fourth year and making it into a MATLAB teaching course.
Email: yh443@cam.ac.uk
Aparna Kaaraal Mohan
Aparna is a Master of research student from the EPSRC CDT in Sensor Technologies and Applications programme. She is currently working on single-cell single-phage analysis of the effects of dormancy and resistance evolution towards the efficacy of phage therapy.
Email: ak2432@cam.ac.uk
Nandini Praveenkumar
Nandini is a Master of research student in Connected Electronics and Photonics Systems. She currently is working on Inline optical sensors for cell density and characterization :improving and augmenting current inline sensor.
Email: np586@cam.ac.uk
Jack Bradly
Jack is a Master student from the EPSRC AgriForwards programme. He is been working on Creating an inline sensor from utilisation of the mother machine for tuning a growth culture. Using parts of the modular bioreactor(s).
Email: jackwbradley13@gmail.com
Erez Li
Erez is currently summer research intern student . He is interested in single cell time lapse studies of antimicrobials and phages on bacteria using microfluidics and microscopy, and reverse engineering the regulation of antibiotic production in bacteria.
Email: rl627@cam.ac.uk
Undergraduate Students
James Morgan
James is research assistant/ intern from the UROP summer placement programme. He is develpoing a modular open-source bioreactor with a focus on its using for long term evolution experiments.
Email: jrm242@cam.ac.uk
Alumni
Rui Li - Deep-learning approaches for image processing
Roman Streslov - Computational fluid dynamics for microfluidics design optimisation
Francis Treherne Pollock - Analysing impacts of point-spread function on microscope images
Jorge Garcia Condado (4th year MEng), Maximilian Noka (4th year MEng), Soham Garg (4th year MEng)