Dr. Jenna A. Ott

A promising approach for many environmental and human health crises can be found in our smallest factories: bacteria. Biophysics provides powerful tools to develop experimentally-motivated models that predict the behaviors, and thereby aid in the design of, bacterial communities. However, most biophysical models focus on simple bacterial strains, like E. coli. In my future research vision, I will apply biophysical analyses to non-model bacterial communities and probe resulting predictions using -omics approaches adopted from synthetic biology. With these tools, we will have better predictions for engineered communities in both our environment and in our body.

I am currently finishing up my PhD at Princeton University, advised by Prof. Sujit Datta, where I developed my expertise in biophysical models of bacterial communities. Upon completion, I will join Prof. Mark Blenner and Prof. Kevin Solomon at the University of Delaware as a post-doctoral researcher to investigate plastic-degrading microbes, isolated from the gut of mealworms.