Dr Heather Hendrickson completed her PhD work studying Bacterial Evolution at the University of Pittsburgh (USA). She was awarded a prestigious Human Frontier of Science Program Long Term Fellowship to work with Professor David Sherratt at Oxford University. Heather is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury.

Her group works on how microorganisms evolve with an eye towards understanding what innovations we can coax out of them using adaptive laboratory evolution. She is the co-science lead of MBIE Endeavour Programme “Adaptable phage solutions: an Aotearoa-NZ platform for precision biocontrol for primary industries”. Her research group isolates, studies, and sequences novel bacteriophages from New Zealand that can infect a wide range of bacteria including important agricultural and human pathogens.