Dr Tiaan Heunis is a Research Associate for the Institute for Cell & Molecular Biosciences with areas of expertise is bacterial infection biology, proteomics and antimicrobial peptides.

I conducted my PhD research in the laboratory of Prof. Leon M. T. Dicks in the Department of Microbiology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. My research involved the development of an antimicrobial peptide-eluting nanofiber wound dressing for treating topical infections. I used bacteriocins, from lactic acid bacteria, as alternatives to traditional antibiotics to address the current increase in drug-resistant microbial pathogens, focusing specifically on methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus. The in vivo efficacy of the antimicrobial peptide-eluting nanofiber drug delivery system was shown in a murine infection model. In 2014 I joined the Host-Pathogen Mycobactomics group, headed by Prof. Samantha L. Sampson, in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Stellenbosch University as postdoctoral research fellow. Here I exploited mass spectrometry-based proteomics techniques to gain insight into the proteome of clinical Mycobacterium tuberculosis isolates and to understand the interaction of this pathogen with its human host, both in vitro and in vivo. In 2018 I joined Matthias Trost’s group at Newcastle University as research associate to study ubiquitylation in macrophages.

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