← Back to research site Michael Baffour Awuah
The long way round

From Cape Coast to a phage that won't let go

A biochemistry degree in Ghana, seven courses taught before I was anyone's student again, and a virus that turns one bacterium into three thousand of itself. Here's how those connect.

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First touch 2016 – 2020 University of Cape Coast
Ghana

Biochemistry, and a question about fruit

Cape Coast, Ghana. Fishing canoes still launch off these beaches beneath Cape Coast Castle — the whitewashed fort on the headland, a UNESCO site and one of the heaviest places on the Atlantic coast, where the dungeons and the “Door of No Return” are kept as memorial. The University of Cape Coast sits on the hills above the same sea.

I read Biochemistry at the University of Cape Coast and graduated with a Second Class Upper. My undergraduate dissertation, with Dr. Jerry Ampofo-Asiama, was a physicochemical, functional and nutritional analysis of juice blends made from underutilised tropical fruits — the kind that grow well in Ghana and end up composted because nobody has characterised them.

It was not phage biology. But it was the first time I had a question nobody had written the answer to, and had to build the assay that would settle it. That turned out to be the transferable part.

  • B.Sc. Biochemistry
  • Second Class Upper
  • First independent project
Build-up play 2020 – 2021 University of Cape Coast
Teaching

Seven courses, and what teaching does to you

Teaching, back at Cape Coast. Seven undergraduate courses — where you find out how much of a thing you actually understand. The talking drum at the right is squeezed under the arm while struck, bending its pitch to mimic speech; for centuries it carried messages between towns, which makes it a fair emblem for lecturing. The pods are cocoa, the crop the region runs on — Ghana is the world's second-largest producer. Adinkrahene, the three rings, is the chief of the Adinkra symbols: leadership by example.

Before I was anyone's graduate student, I taught. Seven courses across two years at Cape Coast — Biological Oxidation & Bioenergetics, Biochemical Techniques, Enzyme Action & Catalysis, General Biochemistry Practical, Biostatistics, Diversity of Living Organisms — to more than seven hundred enrolled students. One practical alone had 209.

I also supervised six undergraduates on the phytochemistry of Garcinia kola. Standing in front of 200 people who will ask the one question you glossed over is the fastest way to find out which parts of your understanding are real. Most of how I explain my own work now was built there.

  • 7 courses
  • 700+ students
  • 6 undergraduates supervised
The transfer Aug 2022 Texas A&M University
College Station, TX

Ramsey Lab, and the Center for Phage Technology

The Brazos Valley, Texas. College Station sits in post oak savannah — open grassland with squat, broad oaks scattered through it rather than closed forest, and a great deal of sky. The water tower is the landmark most small Texas towns are navigated by. About 7,500 km from the Gulf of Guinea.

I moved to College Station to start a Ph.D. in Biology (Microbiology) with Dr. Jolene Ramsey, affiliated with the Center for Phage Technology. Two semesters in I was back in front of a class, teaching Intro Biology I and II — different country, same job, and this time in a second language of instruction I had to learn the local idiom for.

The lab works on how phages decide to lyse. That decision is where I have spent the last four years.

  • Ph.D. in progress
  • Advisor: Dr. Jolene Ramsey
  • Center for Phage Technology
Holding it up The thesis Bacteriophage N4
Lysis inhibition

Delaying the inevitable

Lysis inhibition, in one picture. The infected cell is ready to burst — virions are assembled — but phages landing on the outside signal that hosts are scarce. So the phage holds the door shut and keeps building. The phenotype is a timing decision: when to lyse, not whether.

Most phages infect, replicate, and burst the cell on a schedule. Phage N4 can decline to. Under the right conditions it holds the cell together and keeps building — turning a single bacterium into a factory that releases over 3,000 particles, bursting asynchronously from about three hours post-infection instead of ending early with a fraction of that. That number is not mine: Schito counted it in 1974 (J Virol 13:186), and it is the observation that made me want to know how the phage decides.

If you can find the switch that holds lysis off, you can ask it to stay off — and a high-titer phage prep stops being a matter of luck.

My dissertation, Delaying the Inevitable — Lysis Inhibition in Bacteriophage N4, is an attempt to find that switch and describe how it is thrown. The applications I care about are phage therapy manufacture, where titer is the bottleneck, and programmable microbial biofactories.

  • >3,000 particles/cell
  • Bursts from ~3 h
  • Lysis timing
First goal 2025 First paper
Serwaa

A phage named after my grandmother

Kente, and a name. Kente is woven in strips on a narrow loom and sewn edge to edge, which is why the pattern runs in bands. The colours carry meaning in Akan usage — gold for royalty and worth, green for growth and harvest, red for what was struggled for. Naming a phage Serwaa, after his grandmother, puts a family name into GenBank permanently.

The first paper with my name on it is a genome announcement for a phage we isolated and called Serwaa, after my grandmother. Annie Koh, an undergraduate I mentored, did the work that made it a paper.

Naming an organism is one of the few things in science you get to do purely because it means something to you. I do not expect the name to matter to anyone reading the genome. It matters to me.

Transmission electron micrograph of phage Serwaa
Serwaa under TEM.
The finish Nov 2025 First-author preprint
bioRxiv

How N4 actually opens the cell

The lysis machinery. N4 opens its host with a two-part system: a holin punches holes in the inner membrane, and a SAR endolysin escapes through them to cut the cell wall. This is the machinery whose timing the regulator controls — the subject of the first-author preprint.

The first-author preprint describes the lysis machinery itself: N4 uses a SAR endolysin–holin system to take the host cell apart. Knowing the mechanism is what makes the inhibition question answerable — you cannot explain how something is delayed until you know what is being delayed.

Off the ball Ongoing Open-source
research software

The tools were self-defence first

Why the tools exist. A lysis experiment produces the curve on the right: turbidity climbs while cells grow, then crashes when they burst. Drawing that figure a dozen times a week is exactly the kind of chore worth automating once — which is how most of the software on this site started.

Sixteen-odd open tools have come out of this PhD, and none of them started as a project. They started as the twelfth time I wrote the same ggplot2 boilerplate, or the third evening lost to a dilution I could have solved on paper if I trusted my arithmetic at 9pm.

They are browser-first and privacy-first — your data never leaves your machine — and the ones worth citing carry Zenodo DOIs. The difference between a lab annoyance and a shipped tool turned out to be a few evenings and the stubbornness to finish.

  • 16+ tools
  • DOI-indexed
  • Runs in the browser
Silverware Aug 2025 Texas A&M
Recognition

The Patterson Fellowship

The Black Star, and the drums. The star at the centre of Ghana's flag is the emblem of African emancipation, taken from Marcus Garvey's Black Star Line; the national team is named for it. The tall pair at the left are fontomfrom — royal drums whose ensemble drives adowa and kete, the dances of Ashanti and coastal ceremony. The Patterson citation reads “for the discovery of a novel lysis regulator in phage N4.”

In August 2025 I received the Thomas L. Patterson Graduate Student Fellowship. Alongside it: judging the Texas Junior Science & Humanities Symposium and the SACNAS Diversity in Science Symposium, mentoring incoming teaching assistants, and doing Darwin Day outreach with a cardboard phage that has held up better than expected.

  • Patterson Fellowship
  • Texas JSHS judge
  • SACNAS judge
Michael Baffour Awuah receiving the Thomas L. Patterson Graduate Student Fellowship
Patterson Fellowship, August 2025.
Second half 2027 Next

What I'm looking for next

Still open. Cape Coast to College Station is roughly 7,500 km and nine years. The tree on the horizon is a baobab — the “upside-down tree” of the savannah, which lives for centuries and marks meeting places and crossroads across West Africa. The road out of this chapter has not been picked yet — postdoc, biotech R&D, AI-for-science, or scientific software — and the criterion is the difficulty of the question, not the sector it sits in.

I defend in 2027, and I want the hardest problem someone will let me near. I'm looking at postdoctoral positions where the question is genuinely open — phage–host decision-making, the biology nobody has a clean model for yet — and equally at biotech R&D, AI-for-science teams, translational research, and scientific software built by people who have run the experiment themselves.

What I'm optimising for is the difficulty and the interest of the problem, not the sector. A postdoc that lets me chase a real mechanism and a company solving something nobody has solved are the same job to me.

The through-line from the fruit juice project to N4 is the same thing every time: find the question nobody has settled, build the thing that settles it, then give the thing away so the next person starts further along.

Where that leaves things

As of August 2026.

3
Novel phages isolated
16+
Open research tools
9
Courses taught, 2 universities
10
Undergraduates mentored
2
Countries
1
Grandmother, immortalised

That's the narrative version. The formal record — publications, talks, teaching tables, awards — lives in the CV.

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