Professor of Systems and Synthetic Microbiology
Academic Division: Information Engineering
Research group: Control
Telephone: +44 1223 3 32753
Email: sb2330@cam.ac.uk
Research interests
- Systems analysis of antibiotic persistence and transient tolerance
- Systems analysis of bacteriophage infection kinetics in bacteria
- Method developments for high-throughput dynamic phenotyping
- Engineering and characterising bacteriophage viruses with therapeutic potential
- Designing combination therapy and physiological steering approaches to eradicate infections
Strategic themes
Bioengineering
Systems Microbiology: Analysis of antibiotic tolerance, persistence, and phage infection in bacteria
Synthetic Microbiology: Engineering therapeutic genetic control circuits and bacteriophages to combat antibiotic tolerance
Method Development: Developing Microfluidic and Microscopic methodologies for analysis of genetic circuits and phage infection in bacteria
Smart Microscopy: Developing targeted microscopy solutions for dynamic phenotyping
Biography
Somenath’s research focuses on the systems-level analysis of microbial physiology and on using synthetic biology to test, perturb and build biological systems. His group combines quantitative single-cell and single-molecule imaging, microfluidics, and computational approaches to understand how microbial cells respond to changing environments, with particular interests in antimicrobial resistance and tolerance, phage–host interactions, and the dynamics of infection and treatment response.
Somenath trained as a single-molecule biophysicist, completing his PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with Professor James Weisshaar, where he developed super-resolution imaging approaches to study fundamental cellular processes in bacteria. He then moved to Harvard University for postdoctoral work with Professor Johan Paulsson, developing high-throughput time-lapse imaging methods for following individual microbes under precisely controlled and dynamically changing growth conditions.
While much of his work centres on developing quantitative and synthetic approaches for microbiology, he remains broadly interested in understanding the dynamics, variability and control of natural cellular systems.
Department role and responsibilities
Lecturer - 3G1: Molecular Bioengineering
Lab leader - ExA: Bioengineering Extension Activity
Project leader - SG2: Bioreactor Control
Committees: Bioengineering Steering Committee, Biosafety committee, Department's Ethics Committee, Department's EDI committee
Supervisor for MEng, MPhil, and PhD students, and PDRAs