The Bergkessel lab is interested in understanding what bacteria are doing, and how those activities are regulated, under conditions that do not permit active growth. Megan has always been interested in microbial stress responses, studying amino acid starvation in yeast during her PhD in Christine Guthrie’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco and then shifting to the study of Pseudomonas aeruginosa growth arrest during her post-doc in Dianne Newman’s lab at Caltech. She started her own group at the University of Dundee in 2019 and has since expanded her investigations to additional Gram-negative bacteria including Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica, and Klebsiella pneumoniae. She has active collaborations with the Drug Discovery Unit at the University of Dundee to explore the antibiotic tolerance of growth-arrested cells and whether this can be targeted with new therapeutics.