Cynthia Sharma

Cynthia Mira Sharma (born 1979) is a biologist, who is Chair of Molecular Infection Biology II at the University of Würzburg. Her research focuses on how bacterial pathogens regulate their gene expression to adapt to changing environments or stress conditions.

Early life and education

Sharma attended the Steinbart-Gymnasium in Duisburg. She studied Biology at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf and moved to the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology for her doctoral studies, during which she studied small regulatory RNAs. She remained at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology for a short postdoctoral position with Jörg Vogel. In late 2010, she performed a short postdoctoral research in the United States where she worked alongside Gisela Storz at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD

Research and career

In 2010 Sharma was recruited to the University of Würzburg's Research Center for Infectious Diseases (ZINF, Zentrum für Infektionsforschung), as an independent young investigator group leader. Her research focuses on bacterial pathogens and how they adapt to their hosts and changing environments. She is particularly interested in how bacteria regulate their gene expression. She is interested in small regulatory RNAs (sRNAs) as well as the proteins that bind RNA, which are important in cell physiology.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Sharma together with Chase Beisel developed a RNA diagnostic platform to distinguish different respiratory viruses and virus variants based on CRISPR. The test, Leveraging Engineered tracrRNAs and On-target DNAs for PArallel RNA Detection, (LEOPARD), can detect many RNAs at once, offering the potential to identify several disease-related biomarkers.