Group photo - March 2025. From left to right: Joseph Newman, Manuel Godoy, Sepideh Bourenjanshirazi, Alisa Nira, Fabrizio Alberti, Pan Prasongpholchai, Lamita Abbas, Amjakhid Satikbatcha, Simreet Mahal, Kim Summers.
Present members
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Dr Fabrizio Alberti
UKRI Future Leaders Fellow (Associate Professor)
Fabrizio is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. He started his independent research in 2018 through the support of a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship to investigate the biosynthesis of fungal meroterpenoids. Before then, he was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Corre Lab (2015-2018), working to discover new natural products from actinomycetes. He completed his PhD studies at the University of Bristol in the Foster/Bailey Lab (2012-2015), focusing on the biosynthesis of terpenoid antibiotics.
Fabrizio is an active member of the Microbiology Society as an elected member of the Eukaryotic Division. He is also an editorial board member of the journal Synthetic and Systems Biotechnology and a founding editorial board member of the newly-launched journal Microbiology Outlooks.
Panward (Pan) completed her PhD from the Department of Chemistry, University of Warwick under the supervision of Dr Manuela Tosin and Prof Christophe Corre. Her PhD focused on the elucidation of a cryptic polyketide synthase biosynthetic pathway from Rhodococcus sp. Pan first joined the Alberti lab between March and June 2021, where she worked on improving the biomass production of mushroom-forming fungi when grown in different carbon sources. Before returning to the Alberti lab as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Pan worked in Prof Claudia Blindauer's group on the determination of Zn2+-binding proteins in plasma samples via 2D protein chromatography and MS.
Dr Panward Prasongpholchai
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Manuel completed his PhD at the University of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 2014, working on E. coli regulatory systems for carbon flow with implications for to industrially relevant compounds. After carrying out postdoctoral work on other bacteria, including Rhodospirillum, Magnetospirillum and Pseudomonas, in Buenos Aires and CIB-CSIC (Madrid, Spain), Manuel joined the University of Warwick in 2024. He currently works on an EPSRC-funded project supervised by Prof John McCarthy, Prof Christophe Corre, Dr Alexander Darlington and Fabrizio that focuses on combinatorial biosynthetic pathway engineering in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, using a fungal polyketide pathway as a model.
Dr Manuel Godoy
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr Tiantian Fu
Tiantian completed her PhD studies at the University of Warwick in Yin Chen’ lab at the School of Life Sciences (2013-2017), investigating the genetic and biochemical mechanism of quaternary amine degradation in the microbial community in human gut. Before joining the Alberti lab, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham working on host-microbial interaction using molecular microbiology techniques (2018-2020), a 3-month WISB Postdoctoral Research Fellow (2017) and a 6-month WAMIC Early Career Research Fellow at Warwick University (2016).
Senior Research Technician
Dr Kim Summers
Kim completed her PhD studies at the University of Birmingham under the supervision of Dr Jan-Ulrich Kreft and Dr Andy Lovering (2015-2019), where she used mathematical models and chemostats to study population dynamics of a predatory bacterium (Bdellovibrio bacteriovorus) and its prey. Before joining the Alberti lab, she worked as a PDRA on various projects at the University of Warwick and Earlham Institute, including under the supervision of Prof Liz Wellington and Prof Chris Quince.
Senior Research Technician
Ms Alisa Nira
Alisa completed her BSc in Biology at Kasetsart University in 2017, and a Master's degree in Biotechnology at Mahidol University (2021). She started her PhD in Synthetic Biology at the university of Warwick in 2022, supported by a scholarship from the Thai government. Alisa is jointly supervised by Fabrizio, Dr Alexander Darlington and Prof John McCarhty, and she's working on a project that aims to study noise transmission in naturally evolved and engineered genetic networks.
PhD student
Joseph completed his BSc in Chemistry at the University of Keele. He joined Warwick in 2022 to carry out his MRes under the supervision of Dr Matthew Jenner and Fabrizio, studying fungal siderophore biosynthesis. He is now a PhD student in the Jenner and Alberti labs, where he studies the biosynthesis of microbial siderophores.
Mr Joseph Newman
PhD student
Ms Sepideh Bourenjanshirazi
Sepideh completed her MSc in Microbial Biotechnology at Shahid Beheshti University in 2022. After gaining over two years of industrial experience as a research assistant at a biotech spin-out from Shiraz University, she joined the MIBTP program in September 2024 to pursue her PhD. Her project, which is jointly supervised by Dr Alexander Darlington, Prof Christophe Corre, and Fabrizio, focuses on model-guided metabolic engineering of E. coli to optimize the production of natural products for pharmaceutical and industrial applications.
PhD student
