Principal Investigator

 

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems at UMass Chan Medical School, and Director of Operations for the UMass Center for Microbiome Research. My background is in applying genomic and metagenomic approaches to understand the how microbial diseases. A particular focus of my work has been developing methods and approaches for strain-level identification of pathogens, often in the context of complex microbiomes. This work has been applied to understand risk factors for life threatening infections in pre-term infants to determining carriage of multi-drug resistant pathogens in nursing home elder populations. In the hospital setting I have focused on genomic surveillance and detection of clinical variants of important ESKAPE pathogens and support infection control through genomic characterization of suspected hospital outbreaks. Ongoing efforts seek to integrate GIS-enabled epidemiology with phylogenetic analysis of pathogens circulating in our regional communities. The Center for Microbiome Research was founded to support collaborative research and participates in multiple projects at UMass Chan.