Dr Carolin M Kobras PhD

PhD, Milner Centre for Evolution, University of Bath, 2019
MSc in Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, 2015
BSc in Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, 2013

Dr Carolin Kobras obtained her BSc and MSc degrees in Biology from Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany, where her research focused on bacterial interactions with peptide antibiotics. She completed her PhD at the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath, investigating antimicrobial peptide resistance in Bacillus subtilis in 2019. During her training, she developed a strong interest in how bacteria respond and adapt to antimicrobial stress.

She subsequently worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield, studying β-lactam resistance in Streptococcus pneumoniae, before moving to the University of Oxford, where she investigated how to improve antibacterial strategies to kill Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae. At Oxford, she also held an EPA Cephalosporin Junior Research Fellowship at Linacre College.

Dr Kobras was awarded a BBSRC Fellowship and established her independent research group at the University of Birmingham in 2026. Her group investigates antibiotic tolerance and resistance, with a particular focus on staphylococci, using bacterial genetics and genomics to understand bacterial survival and adaptation during antibiotic treatment.

Biomedical Sciences – Microbes, Infection and Microbiomes (Practical course and tutorial)

Dr Kobras welcomes enquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in how bacteria survive and adapt to antibiotic treatment. Projects may combine molecular microbiology, experimental evolution and population genomics, bridging fundamental laboratory discoveries with real-world relevance through the analysis of clinical isolate collections.

Treatment failure of bacterial infections is a major and growing public health challenge. The Kobras Lab investigates how bacteria survive antibiotic exposure and how these survival strategies influence treatment outcomes and the evolution of antimicrobial resistance.

Bacteria can survive antibiotic treatment through different mechanisms. Antibiotic resistance enables bacteria to grow at antibiotic concentrations that would normally inhibit them, whereas antibiotic tolerance allows otherwise susceptible bacteria to survive transient exposure without a significant increase in the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC). While resistance has been studied extensively, the contribution of antibiotic tolerance to persistent and recurrent infections and to the evolution of resistance remains less well understood. Dr Kobras’ research aims to uncover the genetic and physiological basis of these survival strategies and understand their significance in clinical isolates.

Her group combines molecular microbiology and experimental evolution with population genomics, bridging controlled laboratory studies with the analysis of clinical isolate collections. Experimental systems are used to investigate the mechanisms and evolutionary trajectories that enable bacterial survival, integrating these findings with large-scale genomic analyses to examine how antibiotic survival traits emerge, spread and persist in real-world bacterial populations.