Welcome

Our lab studies how pathogens evolve and spread. We use experimental and computational tools to test our hypotheses, and collaborate with clinical and public health institutions. We focus on questions of antibiotic resistance, within-host evolution and between-host transmission, and pathogen response to host immune pressures. Our overall aim is to improve diagnostics, therapeutics, and clinical and public health strategies to aid in the control of infectious diseases.

Updates from the Lab

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November 2023: There are many wonderful pieces of news to share from this month! First, congratulations to Yonatan on becoming a tenured professor!!! Thank you for all that you do in keeping the lab running and thriving! We are thrilled to be able to keep doing the research that we all love with an amazing group of people to continue advancing our understanding of pathogen evolution, transmission, and control! Second, congratulations to Aishani on winning the Rhodes scholarship!!! This is so incredibly well-deserved and we are so thrilled and excited for you for you as you start to embark on this next chapter of your career!

Welcome to two new postdocs, Aditi Mukherjee and David Helekal! We are so excited to have you in the group and to work with you!

A new preprint from Maddy defines spatiotemporal trends of group A streptococcus in the U.S. We are so proud of you, Maddy, for the incredible work that you have done on this project (which is also the first publication of her PhD!) and for defining a whole new and exciting direction of research in the lab!

Tse Yang, Mui, Maddy, and QinQin attended Epidemics and had an amazing time learning about the latest work in mathematical modeling of infectious diseases, genomics, and phylodynamics, presenting their work, and meeting new and old colleagues!

October 2023: It is bittersweet to say farewell to Lisa, who is moving to the Netherlands where she will continue her work as a physician. We are grateful for all the work that Lisa has pioneered in the lab on serum resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoeae. We will miss you! We also welcome Eric Vickers, a rotation student from the Biological Sciences in Public Health Program! Congratulations to Kirstin, Maddy, Mui, and QinQin, who presented their work at IDWeek! Congratulations to Kirstin on her new publication, Estimating changes in antibiotic consumption with the introduction of doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis in the United States in press at Lancet Microbe. Congratulations to Stephen on his new publication, Viral kinetics of sequential SARS-CoV-2 infections. Congratulations to Stephen and Kirstin on their new preprint, Drivers of geographic patterns in outpatient antibiotic prescribing in 2 the United States.

September 2023: Congratulations to Adi, Lisa, and Rebecca who presented their work at the International Pathogenic Neisseria Conference! Congratulations to Jason, Kirstin, and Stephen on their new preprint, Optimal environmental testing frequency for outbreak surveillance.

August 2023: We welcome Rachel Mittelstaedt who is joining us as an Infectious Diseases Fellow and Bailey Bowcutt who is joining us as a rotation student from the Biological Sciences in Public Health Program! Congratulations to Emily on her new publication, Resistance-minimizing strategies for introducing a novel antibiotic for gonorrhea treatment: a mathematical modeling study, published in Lancet Microbe. Congratulations to Tatum on her publication, A genomic perspective on the near-term impact of doxycycline post-exposure prophylaxis on Neisseria gonorrhoeae antimicrobial resistance, published in Clinical Infectious Diseases.

July 2023: It is bittersweet to say goodbye to Tatum and Stephen who are starting their own labs as Assistant Professors at the University of Georgia and the University of Colorado, respectively. Thank you for all of the incredible work that you have done in genomics, modeling, epidemiology, mentoring, and so much more over the years. We will miss you so much and can’t want to hear about all that your labs will discover!

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