Author name: Hemaa Selvakumar

Hemaa Selvakumar is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Mutalik Lab and a member of the Phage Foundry initiative of the DOE BRaVE project focused on combating emerging drug-resistant pathogens. She is interested in developing next-generation approaches to characterize phage-host interactions and building novel machine learning approaches to predict phage susceptibility. She is an alumnus of Georgia Tech (PhD, Physics) and IISc, Bangalore (BS, Physics). During her doctoral studies, she contributed to the development of self-regenerating, biocompatible polymer brushes with anti-biofilm properties and studied the spatiotemporal dynamics of phage-biofilm-immune cell interactions with the guidance of Dr. Jennifer Curtis and Dr. Joshua Weitz. Prior to joining LBNL, Hemaa worked as a Scientist at Felix Biotechnology, where she advanced synthetic biology platforms for engineering therapeutic, non-model phages.