Rate My Professor Paul Jaschke

Dr. Paul Jaschke serves as Senior Lecturer, equivalent to Associate Professor, in Synthetic Biology in the School of Natural Sciences within the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Macquarie University. He obtained a B.Sc. (Honours) in Biochemistry from the University of Alberta in 2003 and a Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of British Columbia in 2010, with his dissertation on discovery and characterization of a new zinc chlorophyll biosynthetic pathway. Following his doctorate, he held an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Department of Bioengineering at Stanford University from 2010 to 2015. His professional trajectory includes Scientist in Residence at Autodesk in 2015, co-founder and CSO of Hyperdrive Science from 2019 to 2022, and academic appointments at Macquarie University starting as Assistant Professor of Synthetic Biology in 2015, promoted to Associate Professor in 2023. Jaschke is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology and supervises the university's iGEM team.

Jaschke's research specializes in synthetic biology, molecular biology, genome engineering, bacteriophages, phage therapy, antimicrobial resistance, tRNA engineering, start codons, next-generation sequencing, and proteomics. His lab explores enhancing phage therapy with CRISPR-engineered T4 and T7 phages against uropathogenic E. coli, functional roles of overlapping genes to slow evolution, and altered genetic codes for GMO biocontainment and orthogonal translation systems. As Primary Chief Investigator, he led the NHMRC Ideas Grant-funded project on treating multi-drug resistant infections with a rapid synthetic phage therapy platform (2020-2023). He is Chief Investigator for the Biomolecular Discovery and Design Research Centre and secured multiple MQRIS grants for infrastructure, including Nano-flow Cytometry Facility (2023) and High-throughput Phenotyping Platform (2022). Key publications encompass 'Overlapping genes in natural and engineered genomes' (Nature Reviews Genetics, 2022), 'Definitive demonstration by synthesis of genome annotation completeness' (PNAS, 2019), 'A fully decompressed synthetic bacteriophage øX174 genome assembled and archived in yeast' (Virology, 2012), 'Proteomic and transcriptomic analysis of Microviridae φX174 infection' (mSystems, 2021), 'Plaque Size Tool: an automated plaque analysis tool' (Virology, 2021), and 'Designing a simple and efficient phage biocontainment system' (Archives of Virology, 2024). Awards include NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship (2010-2012), MQ COVID Recovery Postdoctoral Fellowship (2021), CSIRO FSP Synthetic Biology Top-up awards (2018-2021), and People's Choice Award at MQ BioInnovation Initiative Conference (2024). His contributions advance synthetic genome science, phage engineering, and therapeutic applications against antibiotic-resistant bacteria.