Brandon Berryhill

Interim Postdoc

Brandon A. Berryhill

I recently defended my PhD on April 28th of 2025 in the Levin Lab (EcLF) focusing on the academic and applied considerations of the population and evolutionary dynamics of bacteria, antibiotics, and bacteriophage. I will be starting a Postdoc in January of 2026 with Dan Andersson at Uppsala University in Sweden. In the interim, I will be in the EcLF pushing the frontiers of science around. Currently my projects focus on the joint application of bacteriophage and antibiotics both in vitro and in vivo using Galleria mellonella.

I spent two years as an undergraduate at Emory in the Levin Lab looking at the dynamics of the seemingly perfect phage for phage therapy, PYO. I took a gap-year in the EcLF as the laboratory manager before starting graduate school where I focused on understanding and modeling the dynamics of bacterial defense systems such as Abortive Phage Infection and Crispr-based immunity; as well as the role these systems play with respect to resistance in natural bacterial communities. As a graduate student I focused primarily on understanding virulence in common bacterial pathogens such as Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus with an emphasis on the conditions under which virulence will be favored to evolve and how best to treat virulent infections (in the Galleria mellonella model system) with both bacteriophage and antibiotics. I was also involved in several other projects such as: evaluating the role of phage in the success of Fecal Microbiota Transplantations, using phages as proxies to track pathogens in clinical environments, developing a phage product for potential eIND application, and designing and assisting in the microbial validation of Emory Hospital’s Serious Communicable Disease Unit (SCDU).

For information about these projects, write to me at brandon.berryhill@emory.edu