Profile

Hello! I currently live in London with my boyfriend, who is also a PhD student. I was born and raised in Croatia, but since I visited London when I was 18, I always dreamed of coming back – and I made it!

I’ve graduated as a biotechnologist and microbiologist, and I am particularly interested in fighting bacterial resistance to antibiotics!

Few facts about me:

• I played piano for 12 years and still love practising it – Imperial offers practise rooms 🎹
• I am learning Japanese on my own and would love to visit Japan when an opportunity arrises!
• I am amazed by how smart bacteria are – so so tiny – and such complex things in any way possible.🦠 and just like bacteria adapt to survive, I strive to succeed in my wish to fight them!

My work focuses on investigating antibacterial resistance to antibiotics of Mycobacteria tuberculosis, a bacteria that causes a disease called tuberculosis. Even though tuberculosis has been a danger to humans for more than 2000 years and even though there are existing drugs for its treatment, it still kills more than 1.5 million people a year! It was found that mycobacteria survive antibiotic treatment as they can “hide” from antibiotics with different mechanisms, and I am exploring these mechanisms in order to find new targets and develop new drugs.

Mycobacteria are unfortunately hidden in a third of human population, and is therefore a huge global threat to our health. We need to find a way to specifically kill these hidden bacteria and I aspire to contribute to this challenge with my PhD.

Interesting thing about working with Mycobacteria tuberculosis is that this bacteria specifically grows extreeeemely slowly, so experiments from start to finish can last for a month and a half! It involves loots of planning and callendars to know which experiments need my attention when 🙂