People

Zeus obtained his PhD from the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program (IGP) at Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore in 2021. He then joined the Singapore Centre for Environmental Life Sciences Engineering (SCELSE) as a research fellow after graduation to continue his doctoral projects. His PhD efforts focused on antimicrobial resistance of an opportunistic pathogen, Enterococcus faecalis, and its interplay with membrane physiology. Using a combination of mass spectrometry-based lipidomic analyses together with bacterial genetics and metabolic assays, he investigated how a single phospholipid modifying enzyme involved in antimicrobial resistance has an wide-ranging impact on cell physiology and the lipidome. His other work also examined genetic factors affecting daptomycin resistance acquisition rates in E. faecalis as well as investigating cell membrane organization by bacterial flotillin homologs.

Over at the Lu and Kline group at SMART, his research interest focuses on utilizing combinatorial genetics en masse (CombiGEM) and CRISPRi technology to uncover genetic factors influencing antimicrobial resistance of E. faecalis. The combinatorial nature of this technique not only allows investigation of single genes/operons, but also allows the identification of synergies between multiple genes. Information gained will be useful in the identification of targets for developing anti-resistance strategies.

‍