Dr Priyanka Hastak

Priyanka is a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Kirby Institute. She graduated with her Bachelors in Technology (Biotech) before pursuing her Masters in Biotechnology at the Australian National University in Canberra. 

She completed her PhD in early 2021, her project was on genomic surveillance of antimicrobial resistant pathogens in sepsis patients at the University of Technology, Sydney funded by the AusGem (Australian Centre for Genomic Epidemiology and Microbiology). During her PhD she gained expertise in conducting long read sequencing and bioinformatics analysis to discover not only the resistance and virulence patterns but the emerging multi-drug resistant E. coli clones in sepsis patients.

She was recruited at the Kirby Institute in the Immunovirology and Pathogenesis program in 2021 and her research is focused on understanding the T cell response in sepsis patients and in vaccinated cancer patients. Her aim is to leverage her expertise in molecular biology and bioinformatics to examine the T cell transcriptome and answer questions about their role in localised immunity.