Dr Alma Wu
Postdoctoral Researcher
Dept. of Engineering
Biography
Alma Wu is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Systems and Synthetic Microbiology group in the Department of Engineering, joining in 2023 and supervised by Somenath Bakshi. Prior to this, she completed a PhD in Medicine at the University of Sydney and Westmead Institute for Medical Research, where she worked on the design of curing plasmids to restore antibiotic sensitivity in vivo. Her current projects focus on designing stable genetic circuits, and the development of single-cell microfluidic assays to study them.
Research
I am a plasmid biologist with a background in bacterial genetics, antibiotic resistance, molecular biology and synthetic biology. I am passionate about the promotion of plasmids as not just a tool to enable other areas of research, but as a fascinating and important field itself! My work has mainly focused on the discovery, characterisation and exploitation of natural gene systems already present on natural plasmids (if you've only ever worked with cloning vectors, you're missing out on ~95% of the amazing world of plasmids!), and turning them around to achieve our synbio goals instead. My particular interests are in conjugation systems, toxin-antitoxin systems and antibiotic resistance, and I also have much experience in in vivo and clinical studies.
