Jessica Sacher, PhD

I'm a co-founder of Phage Directory and have a PhD in Microbiology from the University of Alberta (I studied Campylobacter phage biology).

For Phage Directory, I help physicians find phages for their patients, and I'm always trying to find new ways to help the phage field grow (especially through connecting people and highlighting awesome stuff I see happening in the field).

I spent 2022-2024 as a postdoc in Jon Iredell's group at Westmead Institute for Medical Research in Sydney, Australia, helping get Phage Australia off the ground. I helped set up workflows for phage sourcing, biobanking, diagnostics, production, purification and QC of therapeutic phage batches, and helped build data collection systems to track everything we did. We treated more than a dozen patients in our first year, and I'm so proud of that!

As of 2024, I joined the Bollyky lab at Stanford University as a Staff Scientist, where I'm focused on building the Stanford Center for Phage Pharmaceuticals. The ‘Phage Pharm’ will be a home for innovative phage pharmacodynamics and phage-immune interactions research, with a focus on translating findings directly to the bedside and back to the bench.