Stephanie joined the lab in June 2022, the summer after her first year as a veterinary student at PennVet, as an NIH-BI veterinary scholar. Steph was instrumental in starting our first microbiome study in little brown bats, where she combined metagenomic and metatranscriptomic data to understand factors that impact the outcome of P. destructans infection, the fungal pathogen responsible for White Nose Syndrome, a disease that has devastated the bat populations in the U.S. After completing this summer project and returning to her 2nd year in vet school, we were fortunate to be able to bring Steph back to the lab in the summer of 2023 as a Penn Global Research Institutes (PGRI) fellow. With this opportunity, Steph was able to spend the entire summer in the Galapagos working on our One-Health projects in collaboration with the Galapagos Education Research Alliance (GERA).

Jessica is a PennVet student (Class of ‘25) who joined the lab in the summers of 2022 and 2023 as an NIH-BI research fellow. She started and continues work on one of our largest microbiome experiments to date – a longitudinal study of the developing microbiome in piglets and their birthing environment.

Lisa joined the lab in early 2022 as part of our new Institute for Infectious and Zoonotic Diseases (IIZD). She comes to us from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where she established and directed the CHOP Microbiome Center’s sequencing core. She got her PhD in the laboratory of Akiko Iwasaki at Yale University, and completed a postdoc in the Molecular Diagnostics Lab at Yale New Haven Hospital. Since joining the lab, Lisa has been instrumental in developing and leading some of our infectious disease field work both locally in PA, and internationally in the Galapagos.

Ekram joined the lab in early 2022 as an undergraduate Health and Societies major (premed) and worked on a project that uses metagenomics and longitudinal sampling to identify sources of early colonizers of the infant gut.

Sanya spent the summer of 2021 working in the lab on collaborative project that examined the microbiome in dogs with immune mediated disease.

Luke is a rising second year veterinary student at PennVet and is spending the summer of 2021 in the lab as an NIH/Boehringer Ingelheim (NIH-BI) Summer Research fellow. His project focuses on evaluating functional properties of bile acid-producing clostridia.

Leah completed her veterinary degree at Kansas State University and is currently an internal medicine resident at PennVet. Although Leah spends the majority of her time in the clinic, she worked on her residency research project which used portable QPCR technology (Biomeme, Inc.) to develop assays for measuring gut dysbiosis in client-owned dogs.

Ann completed her Ph.D. and postdoc in the laboratory of Danielle Bassett at UPenn, where she used network theory to address questions in cognitive neuroscience. Ann’s role on the team is to advance data analysis and visualization methods for our microbiomeDB project, and she works closely with the larger VEuPathDB team that is our partner in this effort.

Qianxuan completed his first of three rotations in the lab and is a member of the Microbiology, Virology and Parasitology (MVP) Graduate group. Qianxuan’s project focused on a bile acid-prodcing commensal, Clostridium hiranonis, which we initially identified as an important factor in modulating GI disease. Due to COVID, Qianxuan has worked virtually to annotate a recently completed genome of C. hiranonis, while exploring published and unpublished shotgun metagenomic datasets to better understand this organism.

Seble spent the Summer of 2020 ‘in the lab’ (virutally, due to COVID) doing a rotation. She is a member of the Immunology Graduate Group (IGG), and her project focused on using bioinformatic tools to analyze single cell RNA sequencing data (scRNA-seq) from 3-dimensional cultures of intestinal epithelial cells in order to understand how these cells might be better poised to response to infection or inflammation.