Natalie Prystajecky
Program Head for Environmental Microbiology, BCCDC
Dr. Natalie Prystajecky is the Program Head of the Environmental Microbiology and the Molecular and Microbial Genomics laboratories at the BCCDC Public Health Laboratory (PHL). Dr. Prystajecky is also a Clinical Associate Professor in Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of British Columbia. In her clinical roles and research endeavours, she uses emerging technologies such as genomics to improve routine surveillance and outbreak investigations for a wide range of pathogens, particularly in the One Health context. In recent years, she played a pivotal role in developing sequencing capacity at the BCCDC, launching BC’s wastewater surveillance program and conducting collaborative research to respond to H5N1 in birds. She is keen to find new applications of environmental sequencing to approach public health problems, such as sequencing to characterize antimicrobial resistance in wastewater.
