Ekaterina graduated from the Department of Natural Sciences, Novosibirsk State University. As a pre-doctoral fellow, she studied the genetic diversity of microbes from Lake Baikal and received her PhD in Genetics at the Institute of Cytology and Genetics at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Ekaterina joined the laboratory of Konstantin Severinov at the Waksman Institute for Microbiology at Rutgers University in 2003. She has been studying different aspects of bacterophage-host interactions, regulation of phage development, and bacterial defense mechanisms such as restriction-modification systems and then CRISPR-Cas adaptive immunity. As a result of her work on type I-E CRISPR-Cas system, one of the main principals of target recognition by guide CRISPR RNA through seed sequence has been revealed. Another important contribution to the CRISPR field that Ekaterina has made with her colleagues is uncovering of primed adaption, efficient mechanism of spacer uptake from previously encountering invader. Ekaterina’s work focuses on understanding the mechanistic basis of adaptive immunity in prokaryotes. Recently, she started to study novel CRISPR-Cas systems with particular interest to RNA-guided RNA-targeting type VI-A system.