Dr. David Sychantha joined the University of Waterloo as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry and is now working to solve a global health crisis: antibiotic resistance.
Earning his PhD from the University of Guelph, Sychantha’s thesis on bacterial polysaccharide O‑acetylation in Gram‑positive bacteria examined how organisms modify their cell surface sugars and how it influences their structure and interactions.
He then completed his postdoc at McMaster University in Dr. Gerry Wright’s (BSc ‘86, PhD ‘91) lab, where he characterized the modes of action of several antibiotics, antibiotic adjuvants, and anti-virulence agents.
Now at the University of Waterloo, Sychantha oversees his own lab, where he employs structural biology, enzymology, and chemical biology approaches to study how pathogenic bacteria maintain and modify their cell surfaces to resist antibiotics and evade the human immune system.
Specifically, the lab is interested in the biochemical pathways bacteria use to regulate enzymes involved in remodelling the cell wall and controlling cell shape and structure.
The long-term goal of the lab is to define the mechanisms of cell wall homeostasis to inform chemotherapeutic strategies for combating infections caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria.