Leyden Fernandez

Leyden Fernandez is currently affiliated with IceLab. She is working in close collaboration with the Department of Molecular Biology and a multidisciplinary team with expertise in molecular and clinical infection biology. Leyden graduated from Havana University, Cuba with a bachelor and master degree in Biochemistry. She then moved to Spain to do a PhD in biomedical informatics at Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Afterwards, Leyden did a second PhD in microbial ecology at Uppsala University followed by a short postdoc in stem cell biology at Karolinska Institute.

Leyden’s main project at IceLab aims to identify bacterial determinants that can be explored as targets for new antimicrobials. Antibiotic-resistant infections are challenging modern medicine approaches. The overuse of antibiotics to treat chronic infections is exacerbating this problem. Broad spectrum antibiotics also affect human microbial flora, a natural barrier that prevents colonization by exogenous microorganisms. Leyden will use transcriptomic data from pathogenic bacteria to model complex gene regulatory networks. Subsequently, relevant information about adaptation mechanisms in pathogenic bacteria will be extracted and evaluated as potential targets for new antimicrobials.