DrAleksandra Petrovic Fabijan

Dr Aleksandra (Alex) Petrovic Fabijan is a microbiologist and NHMRC Emerging Leadership Fellow at the Centre for Infectious Diseases and Microbiology (CIDM), Westmead Institute for Medical Research, and an Adjunct Lecturer the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on phage-bacteria interactions, phage resistance evolution, and the translational biology underpinning phage therapy for antibiotic-resistant infections.

Alex was the lead phage biologist on one of the world's first-in-human clinical trials of intravenous GMP-grade phage therapy in patients with severe Staphylococcus aureus infections, published in Nature Microbiology (2020). Since then, she has contributed to the treatment of over 40 patients with therapeutic phages at Westmead, advancing both the science and clinical practice of phage therapy in Australia. Her work spans basic and translational research, including the discovery that bacterial L-form switching (a cell wall-deficient state) is a common adaptive response that can compromise both antibiotic and phage efficacy (Microbiology Spectrum, 2022; Nature Microbiology, 2023).

Her current research programme investigates how ecological context shapes the evolutionary trajectories of phage-bacteria co-evolution, integrating high-throughput experimental evolution, multi-omics profiling, and machine learning to build predictive models of resistance evolution. This work is supported by her NHMRC fellowship and the Hooper-Shaw philanthropic funding.

Alex has published over 20 peer-reviewed articles (>1,700 citations, h-index 17) in journals including Nature Microbiology, PLoS Biology, EMBO Molecular Medicine, PLoS Pathogens, and Clinical Infectious Diseases. She served on the Executive Board of the International Society for Viruses of Microbes (2021–2024), co-organised the Viruses of Microbes 2024 conference in Cairns, and coordinated the first ESCMID educational courses on phage therapy. She holds a PhD from the University of Novi Sad (Serbia) and completed her postdoctoral training under Professor Jonathan Iredell at WIMR.