Houra Merrikh

Houra Merrikh is an Iranian-American microbiologist.

Early life and education Merrikh was born in Iran and fled the country during the Iran-Iraq War, she was raised in Turkey. After attending community college in Texas, she enrolled at the University of Houston and later Boston University.

She obtained a M.S. degree in 2006 and a Ph.D. in 2009 from Brandeis University, and worked with biologist Susan Lovett. She was a National Institutes of Health (NIH) postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2009 until 2011. In 2015, she discovered a bacterial protein called Mutation Frequency Decline (Mfd) quickens the bacterial mutation process. In January 2019, she was appointed full Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at Vanderbilt University.

Her work researches ways to slow the rate of bacterial mutations and to block their evolution. In 2017, she led the research group to help bacteria survive hostile environments and resist antibiotics, done through disrupting DNA replication in order to boost the rate of gene mutations.

She has discovered the first compound (ARM-1, which stands for Anti-Resistance Molecule-1) that inhibits the evolution of antimicrobial resistance through transcription-coupled nucleotide excision repair across highly divergent bacterial pathogens. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38911259/.

Honors and awards Merrikh is one of the recipients of the 2013 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Awards, for investigating the impact of replication-transcription conflicts on bacterial evolution. She received the Vilcek Foundation, 2016 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Biomedical Science, and the University of Washington Innovation Award in 2015 for her research on the impact of replication-transcription conflicts on antibiotic resistance development. In both 2020 and 2021, she was named as one of the top ten young scientists in the United States national competitions, in the category of life sciences, by the Blavatnik Foundation.

Publications Her most cited publications after the award of her doctorate are, according to Google Scholar: (Cited 132 times)