Stineke (she/her) is a BBSRC Future Leader Fellow in the Department of Biosciences at the University of Exeter.
She has a broad interest in host-parasite interactions, and has worked on various different model systems to tackle questions that are broadly related to how parasites manipulate their hosts (from behaviour to immune responses), and how hosts counteracts these processes. For her PhD, she worked on behavioural manipulation of insects by baculoviruses, while shifting to bacteria and their viruses (phages) as a model system for host-parasite interactions for her postdoc. Among other things, she has studied if, how and when bacteria use an adaptive immune response (CRISPR-Cas) to defend themselves against phages. More recently she studies how phages manage to counteract the CRISPR-Cas immune response in bacterial hosts. Her lab currently focuses on how they can use CRISPR-Cas systems to alter microbial communities, with a particular focus on removing antimicrobial resistance genes from these communities.