Barbara Sixt MS, PhD

Barbara Susanne Sixt is a passionate researcher with a keen interest in the fields of host-pathogen interaction and cell-autonomous immunity. She was born and raised in Austria and completed both her diploma and PhD studies at the University of Vienna. Her PhD studies focused on the environmental chlamydiae, a group of obligate intracellular bacteria that infect a diverse range of host species, including even protozoa. After having lived almost 30 years in her hometown, Barbara realized that there was a world outside. Moreover, she wanted to turn her focus to human pathogens and look a bit closer at the molecular mechanisms of host-pathogen interactions.

Therefore, she conducted several years of postdoctoral research abroad, first at Duke University in Durham (USA) and later at the Institut Gustave Roussy in Villejuif (close to Paris, France), to obtain insights into diverse techniques and approaches and to expand on hypotheses derived from her PhD work. Finally, in April 2018 she decided to move to an even more exotic place to build up her own lab in Umeå. Despite having left her home country many years ago, Barbara is quite patriotic and returns to Austria each year for a week of skiing in the gorgeous Alps.