Jessica Trinh

Biography

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Sandia in Dr. Catherine Mageeney’s lab studying phage engineering. I obtained my PhD from UC Davis in Microbiology in 2023 studying vector-borne bacterial plant diseases, and am broadly interested in host-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions.

Half of my time is spent on the Phage Foundry project (https://phagefoundry.org/). This project is dedicated to developing phage-based countermeasures to combat emerging pathogens such as antimicrobial-resistant bacteria. For this project, I am working on phage that are integrated into host chromosomes (prophages). The other half is spent on the Intrinsic Control for Genome and Transcriptome Editing in Communities (InCoGenTEC) project which is dedicated to building tools for contained microbiome engineering and to study gene mobility in an environment.

Education

BS, Molecular and Environmental Biology, UC Berkeley, Berkeley CA – 2016

PhD, Microbiology, UC Davis, Davis CA – 2023

Research Interests

Bacteriophage, microbe-microbe interactions, synthetic biology

Presentations

Trinh J, Selvakumar H, Kazakov A, Roux S, Mutalik V, Mageeney C. Induction and engineering of active prophages from Acinetobacter baumanii isolates. Presented as a poster at the 2024 Viral EcoGenomics and Applications Symposium in Berkeley, CA.

Trinh J, Mageeney C, Schoeniger J. Engineering Pseudomonas putida phages for environmental microbiome editing. Presented as a poster at the 2024 SynBio Young Speaker Series conference in Honolulu, HI.

Trinh J, Mutalik V, Mageeney C. Discovery and induction of prophages from Acinetobacter baumannii isolates. Presented as a poster at the 2025 SynBioBeta conference in San Jose, CA.