Hanif Vahedian Movahed, PhD

Postdoctoral Fellow

Growing up in Iran, as an undergraduate, I became fascinated by bacterial cell surface electrostatic charges and their impact on susceptibility to antibiotics. This passion sent me off on a long journey across branches of life to gain a fundamental understating of the specificity of biological interactions. After completing a master's in Biophysics, I moved to the US to pursue a Ph.D. in Biochemistry under the guidance of Richard Ebright, co-advised by Bryce Nickels, where I studied sequence-specificity of bacterial RNA polymerase and its role in modulating the specificity of molecular events during transcription initiation and elongation. I then did a postdoc with Kevin Struhl to study DNA-RNA template specificity of mammalian RNA polymerases. In 2021, I returned to the bacterial field by joining the Hochschild lab. My current research is focused on determining the physiological impact of prion formation in bacteria, a novel yet poorly understood phenomenon in the prokaryotic domain. Outside of the lab, I enjoy debugging my python codes, climbing, cycling into the woods, and swimming in the local lakes.