Meet PhD Student Kayla Simanek

Kayla stands in front of their poster during Poster Day at the School of Public Health.

Kayla Simanek, a fourth-year PhD student in the Paczkowski lab, showcases their latest work in a Nature Communications publication titled “Quorum-sensing synthase mutations re-calibrate autoinducer concentration in clinical isolates of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to enhance pathogenesis”.

The focus of this paper was to understand how certain mutations alter quorum sensing signaling in clinical strains of Pseudomonas aeruginosa to enhance the virulence and pathogenesis of those strains. Simanek demonstrated that RhlI variants are capable of compensating for the loss of Las-dependent signaling. The Paczkowski lab continues to characterize other mutations in clinical strains of P. aeruginosa to ascertain if and how those mutations impact the antibiotic resistance of those strains.

Researchers at the Paczkowski lab are interested in understanding how quorum sensing signaling coordinates virulence gene expression in P. aeruginosa, and this project gave them new insights on how those signaling systems in clinical strains are functioning differently than what has been canonically described. 

Simanek started conducting research on breast cancer in mice at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They transitioned to working on bacteria for their master's degree and studied chemotaxis and flagellar motility in Pseudomonas aeruginosa. After graduating and before joining the Biomedical Sciences PhD program at UAlbany, they completed a yearlong APHL fellowship at the Virginia State Public Health Laboratory where she established a protocol for sequencing Gram-negative patient isolates and helped with SARS-CoV-2 testing.

Simanek hopes to be a principal investigator studying antibiotic-resistant gram-negative pathogens with the NIH or CDC, or a university affiliated with a clinical laboratory. Some advice they would provide new students or those hoping to pursue a graduate career would be to do what makes you feel excited and motivated! Don't let imposter syndrome hold you back - if you want to be here, then you belong here.