Heather Hendrickson

Heather Hendrickson is an American microbiologist based in New Zealand. She is an associate professor in the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. She previously worked at Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand. Her research is focussed on the evolution of bacterial cell shape, and the discovery of bacteriophages that can attack antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the bee disease American foulbrood.

Life and career

Hendrickson was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and moved to California as a young child; she describes herself as "obsessed with birds and bugs from a really young age." Her family members were conservative Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) who did not believe in evolution; in her household there were rules such as "no drinking alcohol, coffee or tea, no popular music and no one smokes. Girls had to wear skirts to church and we were trained as a kid to be a homemaker." Hendrickson moved to the Albany campus of Massey University as a lecturer in evolutionary genetics, rising to Senior Lecturer in Molecular Bioscience in 2015. She moved from Massey University to become a Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury in 2022. She is currently the president of the New Zealand Microbiological Society.

Research Hendrickson studies microbial evolution, specifically bacteriophages and genomics of bacteria. Her research has two main components: transitions in bacterial evolution, including the evolution of cell shape, and the discovery of new bacteriophages, especially ones which could counter antibiotic-resistant bacteria. She uses a combination of experimental evolution, cell biology, and bacterial genomics. All three of these genera lack the gene for the protein MreB (the equivalent of actin in eukaryotes) which controls the width of rod-shaped bacteria. Normally deleting this gene kills the bacterium, but Hendrickson's lab has evolved a rod-like bacterial strain that can withstand the deletion of the MreB gene, enabling them to study how a spherical shape has evolved.

Bacteriophages Hendrickson's lab works on discovering and understanding the biology of bacteriophages that attack the bacteria Pseudomonas, Lactocococus, Mycobacterium, and Paenibacillus.

Hendrickson and her colleagues also work on discovering new bacteriophages that might be effective against antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Six of her students discovered bacteriophages that could kill Mycobacterium smegmatis, a relative of the tuberculosis bacterium M. tuberculosis, which can infect the lungs of vulnerable people such as cystic fibrosis sufferers.

Selected works