Current Postdoctoral Scholars

Respiratory tract infections, particularly bacterial pneumonia, are one of the most common causes of death worldwide. Streptococcus pneumoniae exists as a major contributor to bacterial pneumoniae despite the introduction of antibiotics and vaccinations, with high risk for serious disease and death, especially in aged individuals. The initial immune response to S. pneumoniae is largely mediated by neutrophils, a short-lived innate immune cell, which can become dysfunctional with aging. My work focuses on understanding the normal response neutrophils elicit in response to S. pneumoniae.

The major goal of my research is to reveal the mechanisms of cancer initialization and development. For this aim, I use advanced computational algorithms to deeply analyze into multi-omics cancer genetic data.

Catheter-associated urinary tract infections (CAUTI) are one of the most common nosocomial infections worldwide and represents a significant healthcare burden. CAUTI is often a polymicrobial disease, where a patient is infected with multiple uropathogens. Thus, my research focuses primarily on investigations into the polymicrobial interactions occurring in CAUTI.

The goal of my research is to understand the mechanisms of stress sensing and adaptation in the human pathogen C. neoformans. After encountering temperature and oxidative stress from the human host, C. neformans rapidly reprograms its translatome, which is accompanied by a transient translational repression. We seek to understand how stress from the host results in translational repression in C. neoformans, and the subsequent signalling pathways that lead to remodeling the translatome to one which is stress responsive. 

My work focuses on characterizing protein-protein and protein-RNA interactions involved in RNA editing in the kinetoplastid parasite, Trypanosoma brucei.

My research focuses on developing algorithms and mathematical models to address biological problems. Major areas of interest include computational cancer genomics and sequence analysis.