MIMS Spotlight Series: Meet Thanat Chookajorn
Text written by Nóra Lehotai and Thanat Chookajorn. Pictures owned by Thanat Chookajorn and Mahidol University, Thailand.
I interviewed Thanat Chookajorn, who joined the Billker lab at MIMS in March 2021. Thanat shares his life with his partner and their two dogs. Before this phase in his career, he studied or worked in several countries around the world: Thailand, his homecountry, the US, the UK, Spain, Israel (which he is very fond of), Russia and Cambodia.
Picture: Thanat Chookajorn. Credit: Mahidol University, Thailand.
I joined Barbara Sixt’s lab as a research assistant, with the goal to stay long term as a PhD student. I am studying a bacterial pathogen, called Chlamydia. More specifically, I aim to determine the role of the Chlamydia-containing vacuole in counteracting the intrinsic defense responses of infected host cells. To do so, I am using a lot of microscopic and molecular biology techniques.
The 9th National Infection Biology/Swedish Microbiology Meeting, 16-18 November 2021, will be a virtual meeting that aims to provide a broad vision on current state-of-the-art microbiology techniques and research in Sweden. Keynote speakers are Swedish researchers working within the sub-disciplines of bacteriology, virology, parasitology, host response, clinical infection biology, environmental microbiology, zoonotics, and new methods. To involve junior researchers, additional talks will be selected from the submitted poster abstracts. Poster presentations will be organized as digital poster walks that allow participants to present and discuss their work with other participants.
I am working as a postdoc in Ellen Bushell’s group thanks to a 2-year scholarship from Japan. This type of scholarship is to encourage Japanese postdocs to go abroad, covering both travel fees and my salary.
