Duhita Sant

My research focuses on how microbial communities shape the evolution of bacteria and bacteriophages. In my PhD, I demonstrated that communities drive phage evolution by selecting for broad host-range phages. During my first postdoc at Oxford, I explored how environmental stress, such as pH, affects coevolutionary dynamics within natural bacterial communities, finding that these communities exhibit resilience to such perturbations. Now, in Dr. Manhart’s lab, I study how spatial dynamics, and interspecies interactions shape evolutionary processes in communities of P. aeruginosa and S. aureus in cystic fibrosis by examining the impact of these interactions on mutant fitness, using transposon-insertion mutants as proxies for loss-of-function mutations.

Evolutionary ecology and genomics of microbial populations and communities

BSc Microbiology, Pune University, 2011, MSc Microbiology, Pune University, 2013, PhD Evolutionary biology, Monash University, 2022

March 2024    Best Abstract award in the environmental microbiome category at annual RUMP retreat 2024 of Rutgers University Microbiome Program (750 USD)

May 2022    Travel grant for MEE workshop Communities and Coevolution in Plön, Germany

2021    Faculty of Science Graduate Research Completion Award, Monash University

2020    Australasian Evolution Society 2020 Student Research Award – Prize (500 AUD) for recognition of a single,            significant research publication in evolutionary biology

2017    Faculty of Science Dean’s International postgraduate research scholarship

2013    MSc awarded with high honors (4^th Rank), Pune University

Host diversity slows bacteriophage adaptation by selecting generalists over specialists., Fungal cell membrane-promising drug target for antifungal therapy.