Jyot Antani, PhD

I develop microscopic tools to quantify how viruses interact with their hosts, currently using bacteriophages (viruses of bacteria) as a model system. This research supports the development of phage therapy strategies to combat antimicrobial resistance—a major public-health challenge. Some of my work has been published and is linked below.

At Yale, I am affiliated with the following entities:

• Paul Turner Lab, Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
• Center for Phage Biology and Therapy at Yale
• Yale Quantitative Biology Institute
• Closely collaborated with Thierry Emonet Lab, Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology
• Recently joined Joerg Bewersdorf Lab to perform image analysis on super-resolution microscopy datasets and to learn building new optical microscopy modalities

My PhD research was in Pushkar Lele Lab at Texas A&M University. It focused on the physics of how bacteria move and sense their surroundings. My thesis dissertation (2021) was titled Sensory Functions of the Bacterial Flagellar Motor.

I took an advanced summer course on microscopy in 2022: Optical Microscopy & Imaging in the Biomedical Sciences at Marine Biological Laboratories, Woods Hole, MA (USA). Having fallen in love with the course, I have been going back as a Research Facilitator.

I contribute to scientific service and open science through editorial/society roles, method-sharing, and community outreach. To this end, I…

• serve on the editorial board of mSystems, a non-profit journal by the American Society for Microbiology (ASM)
• serve as a councilor at ASM’s Connecticut Valley Branch
• use Foldscopes to teach local middle school students about microscopy
• have written 1 article (and counting) to explain my science to a high-school educated audience
• made a video explaining the protocol to make agarose pads for microscopic visualization of bacteria