Rate My Professor Sasha Tetu

Dr. Sasha G. Tetu is an Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Molecular Sciences within the School of Natural Sciences at Macquarie University. She obtained her PhD from the University of Sydney, investigating interactions between different mobile genetic elements within bacterial genomes. Following her PhD, Tetu undertook postdoctoral research with Professor Ian Paulsen at Macquarie University, applying molecular microbiology and omics techniques to study microorganisms involved in disease, industrial, and agricultural processes.

Tetu's research focuses on understanding the genetic basis for microbial adaptation to environmental pressures and the impacts of environmental perturbations on microbial communities, particularly how mobile genetic elements contribute to niche adaptation in bacteria within applied and environmental microbiology. She held an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) fellowship from 2015 to 2020, examining the effects of anthropogenic pollutants on marine bacteria from population and phenotypic changes to gene expression alterations. Tetu received the J. G. Russell Award in 2015. Her key publications include 'Plastic leachates impair growth and oxygen production in Prochlorococcus, the ocean’s most abundant photosynthetic bacteria' (Communications Biology, 2019), 'The natural history of integrons' (Nature Reviews Microbiology, 2021), 'Discovery of integrons in Archaea: platforms for cross-domain gene transfer' (Science Advances, 2022), 'Molecular insights into polyurethane biodegradation in Pseudomonas protegens' (mBio, 2026), and 'Adaptative and ancient co-evolution of integrons with Xanthomonas genomes' (Microbial Genomics, 2025). With an h-index of 36 and over 4700 citations, her contributions have advanced knowledge in microbial ecology, including the effects of plastic pollution on marine microbes, which received widespread media coverage. She leads projects on pollutant impacts on marine microbes and integron gene cassette origins and supervises postgraduate students while teaching courses such as Applied and Medical Microbiology.