Rafał Mostowy
Principal Investigator
Rafał initially trained in theoretical physics at the Jagiellonian University (2002-2005) and the University of Copenhagen (2005-2007). In 2007 he joined the group of Sebastian Bonhoeffer at ETH Zurich to pursue a PhD in biology. After this, he received a Swiss National Science Foundation “Prospective Postdoc” fellowship to join the group of Christophe Fraser at Imperial College London. In 2013, he was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Intra-European Fellowship to work on the evolution of recombination in Streptococcus pneumoniae at Imperial College London, followed by an Imperial College Research Fellowship at the School of Public Health. In 2018, Rafał joined the Big Data Institute at the University of Oxford as a Senior Researcher in Bacterial Evolution, and early in 2019 he moved to Kraków to start the Microbial Genomics group.
Rafał is also a co-founder of Polonium Foundation, an organisation linking Polish researchers worldwide, and an co-author of a research study on the Polish Scientific Diaspora.
Bogna Smug
Postdoc
Bogna obtained her MSc at the Wroclaw University of Technology and PhD at the University of Exeter. Her thesis, supervised by Ivana Gudelj, was focused on combining mathematical modelling and experimental microbiology data to make sense of the evolution of microbial cooperation. Bogna’s project is focused on using structural bioinformatics and genomics to better understand the emergence of protein mosaicism in phages, with the particular focus on receptor-binding proteins and other structural proteins.
Krzysztof Szczepaniak
Postdoc
Krzysztof obtained his PhD from the International Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology in Warsaw. He then worked as a postdoc in the lab of Stanisław Dunin-Horkawicz in Warsaw, and in 2020 he joined the Microbial Genomics Group as a postdoc. Krzysztof’s project is focused on characterising the mosaicism of the phage proteome. He is also responsible for data and resource management at MGG.
Janusz Koszucki
PhD student
Janusz joined Microbial Genomics Group in January 2020. He completed his MSc at the neighbouring Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology of the Jagiellonian University. In October 2020 he was accepted to the PhD Biomedical Sciences programme at Jagiellonian University. His project is focused on studying the diversity of receptor-binding proteins and other structural genes in Klebsiella pneumoniae prophages and understanding how this diversity is constrained by the diversity of bacterial surface polysaccharides.
Wanangwa Ndovie
PhD Student
Wanangwa obtained his MSc in bioinformatics from College of Medicine in Malawi, where he also worked as a junior bioinformatician as part of the Malawi-Liverpool Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Programme. He is a recipient of the prestigious Malawi Liverpool Wellcome Trust Postgraduate Core Scholarship. In 2021 Wanangwa joined the Microbial Genomics Group as a PhD student. His PhD project is aimed at characterising horizontal gene transfer in bacteriophage genomes.
Vyshakh R Panicker
PhD Student
Vyshakh obtained his MSc in microbiology from Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham in Southern India, after which he worked as a Junior Research Fellow at the JIS Institute of Advanced Studies & Research in Kolkata. In 2022 he joined Microbial Genomics Group as a PhD student. His project is focused on using AlphaFold2 to characterise the diversity of receptor-binding proteins in Klebsiella pneumoniae and understanding how this diversity emerges in an evolutionary context.
Kasia Kopera
Lab Manager
Kasia is a graduate of the Faculty of Biochemistry, Biophysics and Biotechnology at the Jagiellonian University. She is invaluable in helping to coordinate and organise the research activities in Microbial Genomics Group, Tomasz Lab and in the Bioinformatics Research Group.
Alumni
Jan Havranek
MSc student 2019-2021, currently at Eligo Bioscience (Paris, France)
Dana Pikulska
Student/intern 2020-2022