Group members

More information can be found on the institutional website.

Gabriele Micali (PI). I am a physicist interested in biological questions. 
 
After receiving my Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Physics at the University of Milan, I joined the group Robert Endres at Imperial College London. There I applied mathematical models and information theory to study bacterial chemotaxis, i.e. how bacteria bias their movement in response to changes in nutrient concentrations. After receiving a Ph.D. in Life Sciences in 2017, I worked with Marco Cosentino Lagomarsino on stochastic models for bacteria division control. For my postdoc, I joined the Microbial Systems Ecology group led by Martin Ackermann at ETH and Eawag in Zurich, where I complemented my theoretical background with molecular biology and microbial ecology experiments and learned microfluidic techniques to study bacteria.
 
Download CV.

An up-to-date publication list can be found here.

Abhishek Vaidyanathan (DASMEN PhD student). Hello, I did my integrated BS-MS from Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, India. There, I worked mainly on condensed matter physics and statistical physics. I worked with Prof Deepak Dhar for my Masters' thesis, which was titled "A Study of Causal Sets". I later grew very interested in using the tools I acquired while doing physics, in biological systems. Consequently, I did an internship in National Centre of Biological Sciences, Bangalore, where I used stochastic simulations to study self organisation in the Golgi apparatus. Since January 2023, I am working in the Microbial Ecology group at Humanitas University where I aim to use statistical physics and simulations to understand different phenotypes as well as strategies in microbial communities.

Constantinos Xenophontos (Postdoctoral Researcher). I joined the Micali Lab in April 2023, where I work with human microbiome-associated microbes and their interactions with opportunistic pathogens. We are interested in understanding the ecology of microbes with bimodal lifestyles (pathogenic vs. non-pathogenic) and how species interactions between commensal bacteria can influence the phenotype of pathogens and their ability to invade our microbiome.
During my PhD, I worked with bacterial communities in the lab, researching how biodiversity processes, species coexistence and species metabolic interactions influence the ecological functioning of communities.
 
https://scholar.google.de/citations?user=dGgTnyUAAAAJ&hl=en
https://twitter.com/c_xenophontos
 
Photo credit: Stefan Bernhardt / iDiv

Alumni

Hannah Raasch (visiting Master Student 05.22 - 01.23). Hannah's work contributed to the establishment of techniques to study single-cell behaviors at the IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital. Hannah further investigated the role of distributed metabolic functions in microbial communities under fluctuating environments. Hannah's stay was funded by the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes (German Academic Scholarship Foundation). Hannah is now part of AG Bacterial Physiology group at Humboldt University of Berlin.