Ira Zibbu
She/Her
I am queer and I am an evolutionary and molecular biologist.//
Caught between my love for the bench and my computer, I’m an interdisciplinary biologist interested in using experimental evolution to answer questions about how bacterial genomes evolve. I currently work on the world’s longest running microbial evolution experiment, the Lenski Long-Term Evolution Experiment (LTEE), to understand how the arrangement of genes on the chromosomes of these bacteria has changed over the duration of the experiment. I’m a next-generation sequencing and molecular biology buff, and I also enjoy developing open-source bioinformatics tools for research.
I completed by BS-MS at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Thiruvananthapuram in 2024, with a major in Biology and a minor in Data Science, and I start my PhD in fall 2024 at the University of Texas at Austin. I like to cook, explore the outdoors, tinker around on Linux, and devour books.
I spent my late-teens and early twenties using different labels to describe myself, before settling on ‘queer’ to denote the fluid and undefined nature of my identity. I’m grateful to have friends, family and community members who gave me the courage to be myself, and to the queer people who came before me who fought for our rights and for a seat at the table. By being a visibly queer scientist, I hope I can provide help other queer scientists feel a sense of community and representation.
If you’re an undergraduate student in biology looking for some mentorship or advice, please feel free to get in touch with me! You can find my contact information at my blog.