I’m interested in how host-associated communities of bacteria handle their metabolism in the face of large changes like antibiotic treatment or invasion by a pathogen. To look at this, I leverage several methods involving high-throughput sequencing, metabolomics, and metabolic reconstructions to infer the nutrient utilization and metabolic cross-talk between species which ultimately impact the health of the host. To do this, I have developed new bioinformatic and systems biology platforms to find new ways to provide improved context for omics datasets and generate targeted and testable hypotheses within complex communities of organisms.
