Rate My Professor Attika Rehman

Dr. Attika Rehman is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, Faculty of Biomedical Sciences, at the University of Otago. She holds an MPhil and a PhD from the University of Otago, where she completed her doctoral thesis in 2020 entitled "Evolution of ciprofloxacin resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa," under the supervision of Professor Iain Lamont. Her career includes doctoral research and postdoctoral work in the Department of Biochemistry at Otago before transitioning to her current position in Microbiology and Immunology. Rehman's research centers on the molecular basis of infectious diseases, with a particular emphasis on the mechanisms driving antimicrobial resistance in bacterial pathogens. She investigates gene-gene interactions, genomic adaptations, and protein functions that confer resistance to antibiotics like ciprofloxacin and ceftazidime, aiming to identify novel targets for combating drug-resistant infections. Her studies span molecular microbiology, bacterial genomics, protein-protein interactions, and molecular ecology, contributing to strategies against life-threatening pathogens such as Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Listeria monocytogenes.

Rehman has authored several impactful publications, including "Gene-gene interactions dictate ciprofloxacin resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa and facilitate prediction of resistance phenotype from genome sequence data" (Antimicrobial Agents & Chemotherapy, 2021, with Jeukens, Levesque, and Lamont), "Ceftazidime resistance in Pseudomonas aeruginosa is multigenic and complex" (PLoS ONE, 2023, with Ramsay et al.), and "The host GTPase Dynamin 2 modulates apical junction structure to control cell-to-cell spread of Listeria monocytogenes" (Infection and Immunity, 2024, with Tijoriwalla et al.). Earlier contributions include mechanisms of ciprofloxacin resistance (Journal of Medical Microbiology, 2019). She received the 2018 Marjorie McCallum travel scholarship to advance her bioinformatics skills at Laval University, Quebec, and presented research at the 2019 Queenstown Molecular Biology Meetings. Her work enhances understanding of resistance evolution, influencing infectious disease research and therapeutic development.