Dr. Ani (Anahit) Penesyan obtained her PhD from the University of New South Wales (Sydney, Australia), where she worked on a project exploring marine eukaryote-associated microbes for the production of bioactive metabolites and the physiology/ecology of microbial biofilms under the supervision of Professor Staffan Kjelleberg.

Shortly after completing her PhD, Dr. Penesyan joined the research group of Professor Ian Paulsen at Macquarie University in 2011, where she investigated antibiotic resistance in the hospital pathogen Acinetobacter baumannii.

From 2011 to 2014, as an Australian Research Council (ARC) Super Science Fellow, Dr. Penesyan collaborated with several research groups at Macquarie University on a project aimed at exploring microbial adaptations and interactions, both between microorganisms and between microorganisms and the host in cystic fibrosis, using multi-pronged -omics approaches.

After completing the Super Science project, Dr. Penesyan rejoined Professor Paulsen’s group in 2017 to lead research on microbial biofilms, with a particular focus on mechanisms underlying their resistance to environmental stressors, including antibiotics.

Following 1.5 years at UNSW, Dr. Penesyan returned to Macquarie University in 2021 as a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology. She is also currently working with SRI International, a US-based bioinformatics institute, as a curator of the BioCyc online resource.

Dr. Penesyan has widely recognised expertise in using genomics, transcriptomics, and bioinformatics to understand microbial interactions, adaptation and evolution, biofilms, antibiotic resistance, and microbial physiology/ecology.

• Microbial biofilms
• Infectious diseases and microbial pathogenicity
• Antibiotic resistance
• Host-pathogen interactions
• Microbial evolution
• Microbial ecology and physiology
• Microbial interactions
• Biotechnology and bioremediation
• Drug discovery