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As part of a team of collaborators, Dr. Natasha Blitvic recently published an article at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America entitled "Fluid flow generates bacterial conjugation hot spots by increasing the rate of shear-driven cell–cell encounters". The study uses probabilistic modelling and analysis to an experimental study of how shear flow conditions affect the rate at which bacteria exchange DNA. This research was supported by a 2024 Simons Foundation Pivot Fellowship - Dr Blitvic is the first mathematician to win the accolade - which allowed her to spend a year embedded in microbial ecology et ETH Zurich. She presented these results at the Pivot Annual Meeting.

A pure mathematician by training, Dr. Blitvic is also interested in ways in which probabilistic reasoning can provide key insights in other disciplines. She looks for unexpected probabilistic intuition in areas such as combinatorics and algebra, and brings those to bear on hard open problems. Apart from the aforementioned study, during the fellowship year, Dr. Blitvic collaborated on a number of projects, such as on ongoing study of how rare events provide resilience to marine microbial populations in nutrient-deplete environments, more on this to follow soon.