Issue 6
Happy (American) Thanksgiving!
We’re incredibly humbled by all the wonderful feedback and for your help in spreading the word about Capsid & Tail and Phage Directory. Thank you!!
Dear readers,
As our earliest members, we’re immensely thankful for your support and readership. We’re incredibly humbled by all the wonderful feedback and for your help in spreading the word about Capsid & Tail and Phage Directory. Thank you!!
We started Capsid & Tail with the goal of providing a trusted and authoritative place you can come each week to learn about current and future events, new and important research, and career and collaboration opportunities in the phage field.
Starting next week, Capsid & Tail will feature a dedicated Jobs section. This section can also be found on phage.directory/jobs (it’s up and running now!). Please send us (staff@phage.directory) your phage-related jobs, student and postdoc positions, and we’ll add them. Also, if you’re seeking opportunities in the phage field, let us know—we’ll do our best to help you find what you’re looking for.
In the future, we plan to feature guest articles, to spotlight labs and individuals doing great work in the field, and to bring you more information about sources of funding for phage work. As always, if you have ideas, tips, corrections, reach out to us at any time.
Most importantly, we wouldn’t be writing each week if it weren’t for you, so thank you!!
We’ll be back next week with more phage news and musings. For now, it's turkey time!
~ Jessica and Jan
Jessica Sacher, PhD
I'm a co-founder of Phage Directory and have a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Alberta (I studied Campylobacter phage biology). For Phage Directory, I help physicians find phages for their patients, and I'm always trying to find new ways to help the phage field grow (especially through connecting people and highlighting awesome stuff I see happening in the field).
I spent 2022-2024 as a postdoc in Jon Iredell's group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, helping get Phage Australia off the ground. I helped set up workflows for phage sourcing, biobanking, diagnostics, production, purification and QC of therapeutic phage batches, and helped build data collection systems to track everything we did. We treated more than a dozen patients in our first year, and I'm so proud of that!
As of 2024, I joined the Bollyky lab at Stanford University as a Staff Scientist, where I'm focused on phage engineering and delivery (to both microbial and human cells) and hydrogel-embedded phage cocktail development for wounds!