Research

The Hernandez lab studies how environmental factors shape the ecology and evolution of bacteriophage-host interactions. While phages are best known for lysing bacterial cells, their impacts on host fitness can be far more diverse, with some phages even providing fitness benefits under certain contexts. Environmental factors can tip the balance in favor of different strategies, driving shifts in microbial communities with ecosystem-level consequences. We primarily work on non-model marine bacteria and their phages, with a particular interest in prophages (viruses encoded within bacterial genomes that can be dormant or active under different conditions). Our work integrates field, lab, and computational approaches, often using experimental evolution to study how these interactions evolve in changing environments.

Publications

Cathy Hernandez - Bibliography