Genetic mutations can yield antibiotic-resistant bacteria that stifle medical treatments, drive recurrence of disease and cause patient deaths. But there’s another, lesser-known way bacterial cells can thwart antibiotics—by essentially playing possum.
“Persister” cells lie low during antibiotic treatment, allowing them to evade death, before reanimating and even reverting to being sensitive to antibiotics once more. Mehmet Orman wants to know the how and why behind this phenotypical phenomenon.
“They become non-growing cells, or certain cellular functions become inactive,” says Orman, who in January 2026 joined the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an associate professor of biomedical engineering. “And if these functions are targeted by antibiotics, then these cells survive the antibiotic treatments because they don’t have active antibiotic targets.”
Orman comes to UW-Madison from the University of Houston, where he’s spent the past eight years on the faculty of the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. While at Houston, he received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, as well as additional funding from the NSF and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including an NIH K22 Career Transition Award.
Orman, who grew up in Malatya in east-central Turkey and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in chemical engineering from Middle East Technical University in the Turkish capital of Ankara, came to the United States in 2007. He completed his PhD at Rutgers University-New Brunswick in 2011, then got introduced to persister cells as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. After working as a researcher at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, he returned to academia at Houston in 2017.
His lab focuses primarily on bacterial persister cells, examining details such as metabolic activity, RNA expression and protein composition to try to better understand their transformations. More recently, though, Orman has expanded his research scope to include cancer persister cells, specifically the skin cancer melanoma.
“If we understand their formation mechanisms or resuscitation mechanisms, we can design better drugs—either preventing them from becoming persisters or from becoming normal cells again and proliferating,” says Orman.
UW-Madison’s facilities in imaging and single-cell analysis, plus the prospect of colleagues applying machine learning and artificial intelligence methods to biological questions, drew Orman north.
“Persister cells are rare, and it’s so hard to study them,” says Orman, who’s bringing one PhD student and two postdoctoral researchers with him to UW-Madison. “The University of Wisconsin has a lot of really good facilities. They are using single-cell tools to characterize cells.”
Coming from a chemical and biomolecular engineering department, Orman has taught large, required courses in thermodynamics and fluid mechanics, earning a teaching excellence award. He calls himself a hands-on mentor for the student and postdoctoral researchers in his lab.
“I really try my best to help them with everything, like for their research or for their future, whatever they need,” he says. “I’m involved in their research. I give them a lot of suggestions. I always follow up on their experiments—if they do an experiment today, the next morning I go there and check the results. But I also respect them and listen to them.”