Students

Céline Sarah Marine Richard is a PhD candidate in our research group. Her project is focusing on engineering a toolbox of novel bacterial biosensors for deeper discovery by enhancing current screening strategies. She will work first on the optimization of actual biosensor in the research group and then, she will develop new methods and engineer novel biosensors to study mechanisms of action for antimicrobial and bioactive compounds. These biosensors should be usable for future high throughput screening applications for alternatives to today’s antibiotics.

Christoffer Sivertsen is a PhD candidate undertaking a project, which consists of one part of four in the larger interdisciplinary AntifoMar project, which aims to develop biofilm-inhibiting and eradicating compounds for industrial and therapeutic application. Christoffer’s part of the project involves screening extracts of in Arctic and sub-Arctic marine invertebrates for antimicrobial and antibiofilm activity with the goal of identifying novel natural products. Extracts from invertebrates will be tested for relevant activity, and novel compounds will be isolated and their structure elucidated.

Andrea Iselin Elvheim is a PhD candidate in our research group. Her project is focusing on discovering novel biofilm inhibitors from bacteria associated with sessile marine invertebrates. She will sequence the bacteria and search their genomes for gene clusters associated with the production of secondary metabolites. Promising gene products will be further studied and tested for antibiofilm activity. The project is a part of the larger AntifoMar project.

Ataur Rahman is a PhD candidate in our research group. As part of the multidisciplinary AntifoMar project, his PhD project targets to screen substances from unexploited Arctic and sub-Arctic invertebrates for antibiofilm property. He will investigate bioactivity and mechanisms of actions of biofilm-inhibitors and eradicators from marine and synthetic (marine natural product mimics) source to combat both clinical antimicrobial resistance and industrial biofouling.

Hymonti Dey is a PhD candidate in our research group. Her PhD project is a part of the multi-faculty and interdisciplinary research project Lead-to-drug development of amphipathic scaffolds targeting multi-resistant bacteria – LEADScAMR, led by Professor Morten B. Strøm, Dept. of Pharmacy, Faculty of Health Sciences, UiT. This specific PhD project belongs to Work Package 3 and is a collaboration between partners from the Faculty of Health Sciences, the Faculty of Science and Technology, and the Faculty of Biosciences, Fisheries and Economics, and comprises in total three PhD positions. Hymonti Dey will be focusing on bioactivity assays, mode-of-action (MoA) study, and screening for mechanism of resistance development. The overall aim of the research project is to develop antibacterial compounds and formulations to meet the widespread problems of antimicrobial drug resistance in bacteria.