Professor Mike Manefield completed an undergraduate degree with honours in environmental microbiology and a PhD in Australia in 2000 on the ability of algal metabolites to inhibit bacterial quorum sensing. Mike spent four years in the UK developing and applying RNA stable isotope probing. After returning to Australia in 2004 he developed a team of experts in the reductive biodegradation of organohalides, the biotransformation of complex organic matter to methane and biofilm formation and control. He has acquired over $20 million in research funding, published over 130 articles and supervised 15 PhDs and over 20 BSc Honours students to completion. Click here for an extended biography. Google scholar. Email: manefield@unsw.edu.au

Deputy Leader

Dr Matthew Lee is a senior research associate in the team. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Western Australia in 2006. The focus of this work was to gain an understanding of the flux alkaloidal compounds with in plants that confer them with protection against predation. Since then Matt has been part of the Manefield research team. His research interests lie in reductive dechlorination of organochlorine solvents. Matt was the first in the world to publish the discovery of a bacterial culture that can transform chloroform into harmless end products. Google scholar. Email: mattlee@unsw.edu.au

Dr Önder Kimyon obtained his BSc from the Biochemistry Department of Ege University, Turkey and graduated with an MSc from UNSW in 2012. His MSc project focused on the role of quorum sensing in chitinase activity in wastewater treatment. His PhD research explored the role of acylated homoserine lactones (AHLs) produced by activated sludge strains in extracellular enzyme production and redox active compound production. Google scholar. Email: o.kimyon@unsw.edu.au

Dr Miguel Hernandez-Preito joined the Manefield's research team in February 2021 as a senior research associate. He obtained his PhD from the University of Umeå (Sweden) in 2009. The focus of his PhD-work was the biochemical characterization of high-light induced proteins conserved in all photosynthetic organisms. To complement his wet-lab expertise with bioinformatic tools, Miguel joined the Systems biology group, SysBioLab, at the University of Algarve (Portugal). There Miguel compiled all the available microarray data for the cyanobacterium Synechocystis 6803 and performed the largest meta-analysis published for cyanobacteria and free to explore by the scientific community through www.cyanoexpress.eu. He arrived in Australia at the end of 2014 to be part of the ARC Centre of Excellence in translational photosynthesis at The University of Sydney. Besides having a long career working with oxygen producing cyanobacteria, Miguel is excited to put all his knowledge in a new challenging (oxygen depleted) research topic, the characterization of the reductive dehalogenase (TmrA) from Dehalobacter. Google scholar

Dr Mahamadul Hassan obtained his PhD from Murdoch University under Prof Ralf Cord-Ruwisch. He worked on novel bioelectrochemical systems for characterising electron shuttles produced by Pseudomonas aeruginosa. He has been recruited to the team to work on PFAS biodegradation.

Linjie Tang obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, studying environmental engineering. Then he pursued a Masters degree at the UNSW in the same discipline. With a passion for saving the environment in an engineer way, he is now a PhD candidate at UNSW researching the possibility of pre-treatment methods on food waste feedstock used for anaerobic digestion to improve the efficiency of the process. Email: linjie.tang@student.unsw.edu.au

Yi Ren is PhD student originally from China. His main interest is to study the evolutionary process for microorganism to develop ability of PFAS degradation, which includes the understanding the enzymatic limitations through the macromolecular modelling (QM/MM), establishing trajectories of key mutations that could lead to new enzymatic function, investigating the toxicity of PFAS compounds on microorganisms and studying the evolutionary dynamics of microorganisms during the adaptive laboratory evolution experiments. Email: yi.ren6@unsw.edu.au

Evan Landers obtained his BSc in Cell and Molecular Biology from Tulane University in 2012. In 2016, he earned his MSc from the department of Molecular Biology, Microbiology, and Biochemisty at Southern Illinois University, where his thesis focused on the chlamydial partner switching mechanism’s role in persistence. Evan’s PhD in the Manefield lab focuses on reductive dehalogenases in Dehalobacter sp. UNSWDHB and the activity of organohalide respiring bacteria in biofilms. Email: e.landers@student.unsw.edu.au

Shefali Bhadwaj holds a B.Sc in Botany from Delhi University and completed her Post graduation in environmental science from Panjab University in 2018. Then she worked as a research fellow in IIT Mandi for 2 years and investigated the uranium and heavy metal contamination in the groundwater. Her PhD in the Manefield lab focuses on the bioremediation approaches for the PFAS contaminated environment.