About
Aswin Krishna is a PhD candidate at ETH Zürich's Theoretische Biologie group under the supervision of Sonja Lehtinen and Sebastian Bonhoeffer. Affiliated with the Doctorate program at D-USYS, his research focuses on the strain dynamics of Streptococcus pneumoniae and mechanisms maintaining its antigenic diversity, with particular emphasis on within-host strain competition.
- Education:
- PhD in Biology (2022-present), ETH Zürich
- MSc in Biology (2020-2022), ETH Zürich (Major: Ecology and Evolution)
- Bachelor of Technology in Chemical Engineering (2016-2020), IIT Patna, India
His research spans two primary areas: (1) evolutionary dynamics of bacterial antigenic diversity and (2) antibiotic resistance patterns in microbial populations. The work combines computational modeling with empirical data analysis to understand how within-host competition influences strain persistence and resistance development.
Recent publications highlight his contributions to microbial ecology, showing nutrient colimitation as a dynamic property in microbial systems and elucidating competition mechanisms in chitin-degrading communities. Earlier work on algal-bacterial wastewater remediation demonstrates cross-disciplinary interests in applied microbiology.
Aswin is based at ETH Zürich's CHN K 18 laboratory space, working within the Bonhoeffer research group that specializes in theoretical biology approaches to infectious disease dynamics and evolutionary processes.
