People

Tatiana Dimitriu (PI)

Tatiana is an evolutionary microbiologist, interested in the horizontal transmission of mobile genetic elements in bacteria. She grew up and studied in France around Paris, where she obtained her PhD in 2014, studying the social evolution of horizontal gene transfer, under the supervision of Francois Taddei. She moved to the UK in 2015 for a first postdoc with Ben Raymond, starting in Imperial College London then moving to Cornwall (Penryn campus, University of Exeter) in 2016, to study the evolution of virulence in the biocontrol agent Bacillus thuringiensis. She then stayed in Cornwall for a second postdoc with Edze Westra, working on the interaction between CRISPR-Cas, antibiotics and phages. She started her own lab in St Andrews in 2024 as a Royal Society University Research Fellow.

In her spare time, she has an inordinate fondness for reading fiction and playing the piano, and more recently discovering the joys of gardening – when the Scottish weather permits.

Anja Nenninger (Research Assistant)

Nivethanaa Pulavan (PhD student)

Nivethanaa (Nivi) Pulavan grew up in London. She completed her undergraduate and master’s degrees at the University of Birmingham with a year spent studying abroad at the Freie Universität Berlin. In September 2024, she moved to St Andrews to start a PhD looking into how environmental factors influence the horizontal transmission of mobile genetic elements. Outside of her PhD, Nivi enjoys reading and knitting – sometimes at the same time!

Allan Zuza (PhD student, co-supervised)

Allan grew up in Malawi, Southeastern Africa where he completed his BSc with the University of Malawi in 2018. Between July 2019 and May 2025, he worked on multiple research projects studying antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in Enterobacteriaceae. In 2024 he completed his MSc studies with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where he focused on using genomic epidemiology as a tool to understand genomic factors driving clonal expansion of Klebsiella pneumoniae associated with healthcare infections. In May 2025, he joined the University of St Andrews as a PhD student in the School of Medicine, where his work focuses on understanding factors dictating the dissemination of plasmids associated with AMR in Enterobacteriaceae.

Lily Poklembova (Honours student)

Lily Poklembova joined the Dimitriu lab in February 2025 as part of the St Andrews Research Internship Scheme and has continued on as an honours project student. This summer, she screened for novel anti-plasmid systems in Vibrio cholerae as part of the Bacterial Genome Plasticity unit at Institute Pasteur. Now, she is investigating the efficacy of two Type 1 restriction modification systems, EcoKI and EcoBI against plasmid conjugation in different lineages of E. coli.

Joseph Mbuli (Honours student)

Joseph Mbuli is a fourth-year Honours student from Fife at the University of St Andrews. He began his research in the Dimitriu lab over the summer and is now continuing this collaboration for his Honours Project. His project investigates the conjugation rates of several F-like plasmids over the course of culture growth and analyses the impact of environmental factors on this process.