Rate My Professor Branko Rhitman

Dr Branko Rihtman is a Research Fellow and BBSRC Research Fellow in the School of Life Sciences at the University of Warwick. He earned his PhD in Microbiology from the University of Warwick in 2016, supervised by Professors David J. Scanlan and Martha R.J. Clokie, with support from a Chancellor's International PhD Scholarship. Following his doctoral studies, Rihtman continued his research career at Warwick as a postdoctoral researcher before advancing to his current positions. His academic trajectory has been marked by a deepening expertise in virology, genomics, and microbiology, primarily developed within the University of Warwick environment.

Rihtman's research centers on microbial ecology, marine microbiology, environmental microbiology, and phage biology, with a particular emphasis on bacteriophages and their applications against antimicrobial resistance. In April 2025, he received a prestigious BBSRC Fellowship funded at £510,472 for the project 'Viral Voyages: Navigating functional viral metagenomics for novel anti-biofilm solutions.' This work involves large-scale screening of environmental bacteriophage genomes to identify novel viral genes that disrupt bacterial biofilms, offering potential new treatments for antibiotic-resistant infections, including those complicating cystic fibrosis. Rihtman has authored numerous influential publications, including 'INfrastructure for a PHAge REference database: identification of large-scale biases in the current collection of cultured phage genomes' (2021, 382 citations), 'Marine phage genomics: the tip of the iceberg' (2016, FEMS Microbiology Letters, 85 citations), 'Assessing Illumina technology for the high-throughput sequencing of bacteriophage genomes' (2016, PeerJ, 70 citations), 'Cyanophage MazG is a pyrophosphohydrolase but unable to hydrolyse magic spot nucleotides' (2019, Environmental Microbiology Reports, 47 citations), and 'Elucidation of glutamine lipid biosynthesis in marine bacteria reveals its importance under phosphorus deplete growth in Rhodobacteraceae' (2019, The ISME Journal, 47 citations). With over 994 citations, his contributions significantly advance phage genomics and therapeutic applications. He leads the Rihtman Lab in the School of Life Sciences.