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PhD Faculty

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  • PhD Faculty - Bacteriology

    • Ronald Breaker, PhD, BS

      Sterling Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology; Chair, Dept Basic Science: Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry

      Dr. Breaker is a Sterling Professor of the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University, is jointly appointed as a professor in the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, and is an Investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His graduate studies with Dr. Peter Gilham at Purdue University focused on the synthesis of RNA and the catalytic properties of nucleic acids. As a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Gerald Joyce at The Scripps Research Institute, Dr. Breaker pioneered a variety of in vitro evolution strategies to isolate novel RNA enzymes and was the first to discover catalytic DNAs or “deoxyribozymes” using this technology. Since establishing his laboratory at Yale in 1995, Dr. Breaker has continued to conduct research on the advanced functions of nucleic acids, including ribozyme reaction mechanisms, molecular switch technology, next-generation biosensors, and catalytic DNA engineering. In addition, his laboratory has established the first proofs that metabolites are directly bound by messenger RNA elements called riboswitches. Dr. Breaker’s research findings have been published in more than 220 scientific papers, book chapters, and patent applications, and his research has been funded by grants from the NIH, NSF, DARPA, the Hereditary Disease Foundation, and from several biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Hellman Family Trust. In recognition of his research accomplishments at Yale, Dr. Breaker received the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize (1997), the Eli Lilly Award in Microbiology (2005), the Molecular Biology Award from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (2006), and the Merck Award from the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (2016). Dr. Breaker was inducted into the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2014. He has cofounded two biotechnology companies and is a scientific advisor for industry and for various government agencies. He serves on the editorial board for the scientific journals RNA Biology, RNA, and Cell Chemical Biology.
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    • Richard Bucala, MD, PhD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Rheumatology) and Professor of Pathology and of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Chief, Rheumatology, Allergy, & Immunology; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Rheumatologist in Chief, Rheumatology, YNHH

      Richard Bucala, MD, PhD, is Chief, Section of Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology and the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Endowed Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Epidemiology & Public Health. He studies the regulation of the immune system with a focus on how protective responses can lead to immunopathology and disease. His laboratory’s main emphasis is MIF-family cytokines, their role in genetic susceptibility to disease, and their therapeutic targeting for different clinical conditions. The Bucala group is credited with the molecular cloning of MIF and discovery of its critical role in regulating glucocorticoid immunosuppression, which opened novel approaches to therapy in autoimmune inflammatory conditions. His lab also identified the MIF receptor and discovered common polymorphisms in the MIF gene, which show global population stratification. Depending on the nature of the immune or invasive provocation, variant MIF alleles protect from disease or contribute to immunopathology in autoimmunity and in different infections and chronic conditions. His laboratory developed biochips for genetic epidemiology studies of malaria and tuberculosis in resource-limited settings, and his research is leading efforts to develop MIF-based therapies tailored to an individual’s genetic makeup. Dr. Bucala licensed anti-MIF toward the development of Imalumab and his work contributed to the FDA-approved anti-MIF receptor antibody (Milatuzumab). Research partnerships in structure-based drug design have led to novel small molecule MIF modulators for use in autoimmune, oncologic, and infectious diseases. The function of the MIF-like genes expressed by the parasites responsible for malaria, leishmaniasis, and helminthic infection also are under investigation. As these proteins were discovered to uniquely suppress immunologic memory, they offer new targets for vaccination against these infections. Dr. Bucala further is credited with the discovery of the circulating fibrocyte, which is being targeted therapeutically in different fibrosing disorders. He co-founded two biotechnology companies, including the startup MIFCOR begun as a student-advised project. He attends in the Yale New Haven Health System in-patient service and is the past Editor-in-Chief of Arthritis & Rheumatology. Dr. Bucala was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians and has served on advisory boards for the UN, the federal government, the pharmaceutical industry, academia, and private foundations.
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    • Vanessa Ezenwa, PhD

      Professor; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Dr. Vanessa Ezenwa is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. She received a BA in Biology from Rice University, and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University. She completed postdocs at Princeton and the U.S. Geological Survey. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2021, she was a Professor of Ecology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia. Dr. Ezenwa’s research focuses on the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wild animal populations, and she studies how within-host interactions between hosts and pathogens translate to larger-scale epidemiological patterns. She has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Zoetis Award for Veterinary Research Excellence, and a Fulbright Scholar Award. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Ezenwa mentors undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers and served as founding director of the Interdisciplinary Disease Ecology Across Scales (IDEAS) PhD training program at the University of Georgia from 2015-2021.
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    • Erol Fikrig, MD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Section Chief, Infectious Diseases, Internal Medicine

      My laboratory investigates vector-borne diseases. Studies are directed toward understanding Lyme disease, flaviviral infections including dengue and West Nile viruses, and malaria. Efforts on Lyme disease include exploring immunity to Borrelia burgdorferi, selective B. burgdorferi gene expression in vivo, and the immunobiology of Lyme arthritis. Flaviviruses and Plasmodium are used as models  to understand the molecular interactions between pathogens, their arthropod vectors and their mammalian hosts. Finally, we are developing new  approaches to prevent ticks and mosquitoes from feeding on a vertebrate host, thereby interfering with pathogen transmission.
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    • Jorge Galán, PhD, DVM

      Lucille P. Markey Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Professor of Cell Biology

      Dr. Jorge E. Galán earned his DVM from the National University of La Plata (Argentina) and his Ph.D. in Microbiology from Cornell University. He completed postdoctoral studies at Washington University in St. Louis, and was in the Faculty at SUNY Stony Brook before coming to Yale in 1998. He is currently the Lucille B. Markey Professor of Microbiology and Professor of Cell Biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Galán is the recipient of numerous honors and awards including the Pew Scholar in Biomedical Sciences, the Searle Scholar Award, the National Institutes of Health MERIT award in 2000 and 2015, the Hans Sigrist Prize, the Alexander M. Cruickshank Award, and the Robert Koch Prize.  He is a member of the American Academy of Microbiology, the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and a member of the USA National Academy of Science and the USA National Academy of Medicine.  He is a member of several Scientific Advisory Boards and has authored more than 200 publications in the field of bacterial pathogenesis and molecular biology.
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    • Andrew Goodman, PhD

      C.N.H. Long Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Director of Microbial Sciences Institute; Chair, Microbial Pathogenesis

      Andrew L. Goodman, PhD, is the C. N. H. Long Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and Director of the Yale Microbial Sciences Institute. Goodman received his undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, his PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral training at Washington University. His lab uses microbial genetics, gnotobiotics, and mass spectrometry to understand how gut microbes interact with their host during health and disease. The lab is also interested in how the microbiome impacts the efficacy and toxicity of medical drugs. The lab’s contributions have been recognized by the NIH Director New Innovator Award, the Pew Foundation, the Dupont Young Professors Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholars Program, the ASPET John J. Abel Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.
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    • Eduardo Groisman, PhD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis

      I am a geneticist who studies the mechanisms that enable bacteria to both cause disease and further human health. I received an M.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Buenos Aires and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. After spending 20 years in the faculty of the Washington University School of Medicine, I joined the Yale School of Medicine in 2010. For 19 years, I was a member of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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    • Margaret Hostetter

      Former YSM faculty

      Department: PediatricsYears active at Yale: 1998-2010Dr. Hostetter is recognized for going where few women had gone before: leadership posts in pediatrics departments at leading universities. She joined the Yale faculty as a professor of pediatrics and director of the Yale Child Health Research Center. In 2002 she was named the Jean McLean Wallace Professor and chair of the department of pediatrics. At the time, there were no other women chairs at the Yale School of Medicine—and very few across the country. Between 2000 and 2010, Dr. Hostetter was also professor of microbial pathogenesis. She is one of only three women to be elected president of the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society over the past 125 years. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, the American Society of Clinical Investigation (ASCI), and the Association of American Physicians (AAP). It is rare for pediatricians to be elected to both the ASCI and the AAP. Her research has also won research honors including the E. Mead Johnson Award, the Samuel Rosenthal Award, and the Maxwell Finland Lecture in Infectious Diseases.In 2010, Dr. Hostetter left Yale to become chief medical officer and director of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and chair of the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. True to form, she was the first woman to hold those posts.
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    • Barbara Kazmierczak, MD, PhD

      Gustavus and Louise Pfeiffer Research Foundation M.D.-Ph.D. Program Director and Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Professor, Microbial Pathogenesis; Director, MD-PhD Program, Yale University

      Dr. Kazmierczak received her PhD from Rockefeller University (1993) and her MD from Cornell University Medical College (1994), both in New York City. She completed an Internal Medicine residency and Infectious Diseases fellowship training at the University of California, San Francisco, and joined the Yale faculty in 2001. She is currently a Professor of Medicine and Microbial Pathogenesis, and Director of the MD-PhD program at Yale. Dr. Kazmierczak's research program is broadly focused on bacterial and host factors that allow opportunistic infections to occur. Using Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a clinically relevant model, her lab addresses fundamental questions of how cell-envelope spanning bacterial machines - the Type 3 secretion system, Type 4 pili and polar flagellum - are assembled, regulated, and used during infection. She has also identified host responses directed at components of these virulence associated structures, in particular those mediated by the NLRC4 inflammasome. Inflammatory responses to bacteria are also a focus of her work on microbiome-host interactions in infants with Cystic Fibrosis, where her lab has used longitudinal data acquired over five years from cohorts of patients and controls to understand gut microbiome composition and the inflammatory and metabolic responses at this site. Dr. Kazmierczak has been recognized as a Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases (2007), a Donaghue Investigator (2002), and a Hellman Family Fellow (2002). She is a Fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Academy for Microbiology.
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    • Jun Liu, PhD

      Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis

      Dr. Liu has been working in the field of electron microscopy for 20 years. In particular, he gained expertise in cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) after working with Prof. Ken Taylor at Florida State University and Dr. Sriram Subramaniam at NIH. Since he started his own laboratory in 2007, he has been dedicated to developing high-throughput cryo-ET pipeline in which both data collection and image analysis are streamlined and automated. The high-throughput cryo-ET pipeline is becoming increasingly powerful, enabling his laboratory to visualize over 100,000 cells from 100 different bacterial species. More importantly, the massive data from cryo-ET has been systematically utilized to gain structural insights into fundamental biological processes related to signaling transduction, flagellar assembly, protein secretion, phage adsorption DNA translocation, and host-pathogen interactions. Dr. Liu has published more than 60 papers in journals that include Nature, Science, PNAS, and Cell.
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    • John MacMicking, PhD

      Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and of Immunobiology; Member, Yale Systems Biology Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

      John MacMicking is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Professor of Immunobiology. He trained in synthetic organic chemistry at the Australian National University (B.Sc, 1st Class Honors) where he conducted thesis work in the Department of Immunology & Cell Biology formerly headed by 1996 Nobel Laureate, Peter Doherty, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. He then came to the U.S. to pursue Ph.D studies with Carl Nathan in the Immunology program at Cornell University-Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City before being selected as an HHMI Life Science Research Foundation Fellow at The Rockefeller University to conduct studies with John McKinney. His doctoral dissertation described the first knockout of an interferon (IFN)-induced defense protein in eukaryotes - inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) - engineered between 1992-1995. It served as an early paradigm for cell-autonomous innate immunity to bacterial, viral and protozoan infections. At Rockefeller University he computationally identified, physically mapped and began functionally characterizing a complete IFN-inducible GTPase superfamily in humans and mice as a new defense network operating against all pathogen classes. For these discoveries he was named a Edward Mallinckrodt Jr Foundation Fellow (2004), Searle Scholar (2005), Cancer Research Institute Investigator (2006), Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Investigator (2008), CCFA Senior Research Awardee (2010), AAF Scholar (2014), and Kenneth Rainin Foundation Innovator (2014). In 2022, he received the Alumni Award of Distinction (Medical Sciences) from Cornell University. Dr. MacMicking was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and tenured in 2014. He was chosen as an HHMI Investigator in 2015 before moving to the Yale Systems Biology Institute in 2017.
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    • Ruslan Medzhitov, PhD

      Sterling Professor of Immunobiology; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

      Medzhitov laboratory studies biology of inflammation, mechanisms of homoeostasis, allergic immunity and mechanisms of diseases.
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    • Wei Mi

      Assistant Professor of Pharmacology

      Wei Mi obtained his PhD degree in structural biology at Peking University, Beijing, China. Fascinated by structures of membrane proteins, he came to the US and received postdoctoral training at Purdue University, the University of Washington and Harvard Medical School (HMS). At HMS, he joined the laboratory of Dr. Maofu Liao and used single particle cryo-electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) to determine structures of ATP-binding cassette transporters in lipid bilayer environment. In 2019, Dr Mi joined the Department of Pharmacology at Yale University School of Medicine. The focus of his research is to dissect mechanisms of membrane proteins involved in lipopolysaccharide (LPS) synthesis and regulation with genetic, biochemical, and structural approaches.
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    • Hualiang Pi, PhD

      Assistant Professor

      Hualiang Pi, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and member of the Microbial Sciences Institute. Hualiang received her PhD in Microbiology from Cornell University and conducted her postdoctoral training at Vanderbilit University Medical Center. The Pi lab focuses on elucidating microbial stress defense mechanisms important for bacterial infection. She is also the recipient of an NIH Pathway to Independence Award (K99/R00).
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    • Hesper Rego, PhD

      Associate Professor Term

      Hesper trained as physicist in both her undergraduate studies (Caltech, B.S. Physics, 2005), and her graduate studies (UCSF, PhD, Biophysics, 2011). She did her graduate work with the late Mats Gustafsson at UCSF and Janelia Farm. In his group, she developed a nonlinear form of Structured-Illumination Microscopy. Afterwards, wanting to explore a biological phenomenon she did her postdoctoral work with Eric Rubin at the Harvard School of Public Health where she became fascinated by the ability of genetically identical organisms to display different phenotypes. This phenomenon is especially important for the treatment of tuberculosis, a disease caused by the bacterial pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. She is excited to start a research group at the intersection of these two areas: the application of advanced light microscopy techniques to investigate the strategies mycobacteria use to survive the stresses imposed by antibiotics and host.
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    • Craig Roy, PhD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and of Immunobiology and Director of Biological and Biomedical Sciences (BBS); Vice-Chair, Department of Microbial Pathogenesis

      Craig Roy received his B.S. from Michigan State University in 1985 and earned his Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology at Stanford University in 1991 in the laboratory of Dr. Stanley Falkow. After completing a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Ralph Isberg in the Department of Molecular Microbiology at Tufts University School of Medicine in 1996, he was appointed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Stony Brook University. Dr. Roy became a founding member of the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale University in 1998 and serves as Vice-Chair. He currently holds the title of Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Immunobiology. Research in the Roy laboratory focuses on the host-pathogen interface. Using multi-disciplinary approaches his laboratory has discovered many novel mechanisms that intracellular pathogens use to modulate host membrane transport pathways, which allow these pathogens to evade cell autonomous defenses and create novel organelles that permit bacterial replication.
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    • Dieter Soll, PhD

      Sterling Professor Emeritus of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry

      A native of Germany, Prof. Dieter Söll earned undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart, Germany. He did postdoctoral work at the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Enzyme Research and served as an assistant professor there 1965-1967. He joined the Yale faculty as an associate professor in MB&B in 1967, was promoted to a full professorship in the department in 1976 and became a professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology, and the Department of Chemistry in 1985 and 1995, respectively. He was chair of MB&B 1982-1984.Söll's honors include a 1988 Humboldt Preis (Senior Distinguished Scientist Award). He was named a Humboldt Fellow in 2000. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. He has served on the editorial boards of numerous scientific journals and has been a member of many federal advisory panels and committees responsible for the examination of issues related to genetic research.The editor of nine books and author of over 600 scientific articles, Söll spearheaded international efforts in the 1980s to adopt a common computer database and format for recording masses of genetic information gleaned in the worldwide initiative to decipher the entire human genome. He undertook this effort while serving as chair of the International Advisory Committee for DNA Sequence Databases. Earlier in his career, he helped draw national attention to the dangers of genetic engineering research, particularly experiments using hybrid molecules. His and other scientists' concerns ultimately led to federal guidelines for genetic research.
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    • Jing Yan, PhD

      Assistant Professor, Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology

      Jing Yan is currently an Assistant Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and a member of the Quantitative Biology Institute (Qbio) at Yale. Originally from Shanghai, China, he obtained his B.S. degree from the College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at Peking University in China, with extensive undergraduate research experience in organic synthesis. In 2009, he switched to the field of soft matter physics and pursued Ph.D. degree in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In 2014, he stumbled into microbiology at Princeton as a joint postdoctoral researcher in the department of Molecular Biology and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. in 2019, he started his independent lab at Yale. His lab focuses on bacterial biofilms, surface-attached communities of bacteria surrounded by an extracellular matrix. His lab combines state-of-art imaging techniques, biochemical tools, genetics, mechanical measurements, and computer simulations to understand how bacteria build multicellular communities cell by cell, what unique materials they use to do so, and what characteristics emerge at the level of the collective. Ultimately, the lab aims to solve biofilm-related problems in medicine and in industry and to enhance the use of beneficial biofilms. Jing received the Career Award at the Scientific Interface from Burroughs Wellcome Fund (BWF) in 2016, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award in 2021, Sloan Research Fellowship in 2023, and Investigator in Pathogenicity from BWF in 2023.
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  • PhD Faculty - Virology

    • Grace Chen, PhD

      Assistant Professor

      Grace Chen received her undergraduate training in the College of Chemistry at UC Berkeley. She attended Harvard University for her PhD where she worked in David Liu's laboratory to discover and characterize novel RNA modifications. Her postdoctoral research was at Stanford University in Howard Chang's group, where she investigated circular RNA immunity. Grace joined Yale University as a faculty in the Department of Immunobiology in 2019. Her research focuses on the functions and regulations of circular RNAs and RNA modifications in health and disease.
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    • Yung-Chi Cheng, PhD

      Henry Bronson Professor of Pharmacology; Chairman, Consortium for the Globalization of Chinese Medicine (CGCM)

      The Cheng laboratory studies the action of antiviral drugs against HBV, HIV, EBV, and HCV, as well as the discovery of antivirals with unique mode of action against those viruses.
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    • Peter Cresswell, PhD, FRS

      Eugene Higgins Professor of Immunobiology and Professor of Cell Biology

      Dr. Cresswell is the Eugene Higgins Professor of Immunobiology and Professor of Cell Biology and Dermatology at Yale University School of Medicine. He received his B.S. degree in chemistry, his M.S. degree in microbiology from the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, U.K., and his Ph.D. degree in biochemistry and immunology from London University. His postdoctoral training was completed at Harvard University with Jack Strominger.Before assuming his position at Yale, Dr. Cresswell was Chief of the Division of Immunology at Duke University Medical Center. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, U.K., and a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Institute of Medicine.
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    • Allison Didychuk, PhD

      Assistant Professor

      Allison Didychuk was born in northern Manitoba (Canada). Allison made her way south to the University of Jamestown in North Dakota, where she majored in Biology, Chemistry, and Mathematics (B.S. 2012). She then did her Ph.D. in Biophysics with Dr. Samuel Butcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying the assembly of the yeast spliceosome (Ph.D. 2017). She moved to the University of California, Berkeley for postdoctoral training with Dr. Britt Glaunsinger, where she studied essential steps of herpesvirus replication. She joined the Yale faculty in 2022 as an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, where she continues to use diverse approaches - structural biology, molecular virology, single-molecule biophysics, and functional genomics - to understand how herpes viruses work. Click here to visit the Didychuk lab webpage.
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    • Daniel DiMaio, MD, PhD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Genetics and Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and of Therapeutic Radiology; Deputy Director, Yale Cancer Center

      The DiMaio laboratory is studying the molecular mechanisms of how human papillomaviruses enter cells, with a particular focus on identifying the cellular proteins that mediate virus entry and intracellular trafficking and determining their molecular mechanisms of action. In addition, it is using viral transmembrane proteins as a basis to develop a class of artificial small transmembrane proteins with a variety of biological activities, including the ability to form tumors and confer resistance to virus infection. Some of these proteins are the simplest proteins ever described and their study will reveal new features of protein action and the basis for specificity in protein-protein interactions.
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    • Erol Fikrig, MD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Section Chief, Infectious Diseases, Internal Medicine

      My laboratory investigates vector-borne diseases. Studies are directed toward understanding Lyme disease, flaviviral infections including dengue and West Nile viruses, and malaria. Efforts on Lyme disease include exploring immunity to Borrelia burgdorferi, selective B. burgdorferi gene expression in vivo, and the immunobiology of Lyme arthritis. Flaviviruses and Plasmodium are used as models  to understand the molecular interactions between pathogens, their arthropod vectors and their mammalian hosts. Finally, we are developing new  approaches to prevent ticks and mosquitoes from feeding on a vertebrate host, thereby interfering with pathogen transmission.
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    • Richard Flavell, PhD, FRS

      Sterling Professor of Immunobiology; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

      Dr. Flavell is Sterling Professor of Immunobiology at Yale University School of Medicine, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his B.Sc. (Honors) in 1967 and Ph.D. in 1970 in biochemistry from the University of Hull, England, and performed postdoctoral work in Amsterdam (1970-72) with Piet Borst and in Zurich (1972-73) with Charles Weissmann. Before accepting his current position in 1988, Dr. Flavell was first Assistant Professor (equivalent) at the University of Amsterdam (1974-79); then Head of the Laboratory of Gene Structure and Expression at the National Institute for Medical Research, Mill Hill, London (1979-82); and subsequently President and Chief Scientific Officer of Biogen Research Corporation, Cambridge, Massachusetts (1982-88). Dr. Flavell is a fellow of the Royal Society, a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the National Academy of Medicine. Richard Flavell uses transgenic and gene-targeted mice to study Innate and Adaptive immunity, T cell tolerance and activation in immunity and autoimmunity,apoptosis, and regulation of T cell differentiation.
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    • Ellen F Foxman, MD, PhD

      Associate Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Immunobiology

      Dr. Ellen Foxman, M.D., PhD. is an Associate Professor of Laboratory Medicine and Immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies antiviral defense in the human respiratory tract, focusing on innate immunity, an inborn system of protective mechanisms that guards against harmful viruses or bacteria, even when the body has never encountered the infection before. The overarching goal of this research is to improve the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of illnesses caused by respiratory viruses. Background. Dr. Foxman trained in medicine and immunology at Stanford University. She became interested in respiratory viruses during her residency training in clinical pathology at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital, due to the advances in testing that were beginning to reveal a previously unappreciated very high prevalence of these viruses. She later joined Dr. Akiko Iwasaki’s group at Yale as a postdoctoral associate, where she demonstrated suppression of innate immune responses in the airway epithelium by cool ambient temperature. In 2016, she established her independent research group at Yale. Contributions of the Foxman Lab include defining biomarkers to track innate immune responses in the human respiratory tract and uncovering evidence for viral interference, in which general antiviral defenses triggered by common cold viruses protect against unrelated viruses such as influenza and COVID-19.  Dr. Foxman’s recognitions include the 2018 Hartwell Foundation Individual Biomedical Research Award, the 2021 ASCI Young Physician-Scientist Award, and the 2021 Rita Allen Foundation Scholars Award.
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    • Benjamin Goldman-Israelow, MD/PhD

      Assistant Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases)

      Dr. Benjamin Goldman-Israelow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Internal Medicine in the section of Infectious Diseases. He obtained his AB in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis and his MD and PhD degrees from The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. He joined Yale internal medicine in the ABIM Short Track Pathway, completing residency and Infectious Diseases fellowship training. During fellowship, Dr. Goldman-Israelow joined the laboratory of Dr. Akiko Iwasaki for his postdoctoral studies. There, he has studied SARS-CoV-2 infection, pathogenesis, and immunity in both patients and pre-clinical models. His work has led to the development of one of the first mouse models to study SARS-CoV-2, the identification of immunologic factors contributing to COVID-19 pathogenesis and protection, and the development of a novel mucosal vaccine strategy that protects against pathology and transmission.Dr. Goldman-Israelow is a practicing infectious diseases physician and also conducts biomedical research. His lab is focused on understanding the development of mucosal immune memory to emerging and endemic respiratory pathogens. Working through the lenses of natural infection and vaccination, the Israelow lab aims to better understand the correlates of protection and transmission of pandemic-associated pathogens, and leverage this research to develop the next generation of mucosal vaccines and therapeutics.
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    • Nathan Grubaugh, PhD

      Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Nathan Grubaugh joined the faculty at Yale School of Public Health in 2018. Before going to graduate school, he spent ~7 years working in the biotech industry developing early phase vaccine candidates. He earned his MS in biotechnology from Johns Hopkins University (2011) while conducting research at the NIH and the US Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (focus on mosquito-borne virus surveillance). Dr. Grubaugh earned his PhD in microbiology from Colorado State University in 2016 (focus on West Nile virus evolution), and went on to be a postdoctoral fellow at The Scripps Research Institute to study the 2015-2017 Zika virus epidemic. Now at Yale, the Grubaugh Lab uses genomics and phylogenetics to uncover the epidemiological, ecological, and evolutionary determinants of virus outbreaks. They primarily focus on mosquito- and tick-borne viruses, like dengue, West Nile, and Powassan, that are increasingly spreading into new areas and have high outbreak potential. The Grubaugh Lab is diverse and multidisciplinary, including expertise in molecular biology, phylogenetics, statistics, and mathematical modeling. His lab was critical during the COVID-19 response, from designing and evaluating diagnostics (such as SalivaDirect) to establishing the Yale SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Surveillance Initiative to track emerging variants. Expanding on this work, the lab is an academic partner for the Pathogen Genomics Centers of Excellence to foster and improve innovation and technical capacity in pathogen genomics, molecular epidemiology, and bioinformatics to better prevent, control, and respond to microbial threats of public health importance. Read more about their team and work at grubaughlab.com.
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    • Ya-Chi Ho, MD, PhD

      Associate Professor Term; Director of Graduate Studies, Microbiology PhD Program of Biological and Biomedical Sciences

      Dr. Ho's research program focuses on understanding HIV-1 persistence and HIV-1-induced immune dysfunction using single-genome and single-cell approaches on clinical samples. She received MD in 2002 (Phi Tau Phi) and completed internal medicine residency and infectious disease fellowship training in Taiwan in 2007. She practiced as an infectious disease attending physician for one year (2007-2008). She received PhD at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Phi Beta Kappa, HHMI International Student Research Fellowship, and Johns Hopkins Young Investigator Award) in 2013, mentored by Dr. Robert F. Siliciano. During PhD, she developed the first HIV-1 full-length single-genome sequencing method that became the standard measurement of the size of the HIV-1 latent reservoir (Cell 2013). As a postdoc, she profiled HIV-1 DNA and RNA landscape and identified the impact of cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and defective HIV-1 proviruses on HIV-1 persistence (Cell Host Microbe 2017, Best Paper of the Year, corresponding author). After she started my lab at Yale University in September 2017, she developed single-cell HIV-1 SortSeq and identified HIV-1-driven aberrant cancer gene expression at the integration site as a mechanism of HIV-1 persistence (Science Translational Medicine 2020).She developed CRISPR-ready HIV-1-infected cell-line models and a dual-reporter drug screen to identify drugs that can suppress HIV-1-induced cancer gene expression (JCI 2020). She is currently working on understanding HIV-1-induced immune dysfunction and clonal expansion dynamics of HIV-1-infected cells using single-cell multi-omic ECCITEseq on clinical samples (Immunity 2022). She found that HIV-1 preferentially persist in cytotoxic CD4+ T cells. She also found that antigen stimulation and tumor necrosis factor (TNF) as key drivers for the clonal expansion of HIV-1-infected cells. This is the first time identifying single-cell transcriptional landscape of HIV-1 RNA+ cells at their in vivo state without ex vivo stimulations. In addition, she used a genomewide CRISPR screen and identified HIV-1 silencing factors including SAFB family proteins and RNA nuclear exosome complex (J Virol 2022). Dr. Ho's research support mainly comes from NIH, with an R21 funded 1 year after PhD graduation and two R01-level grants funded within one year after she started her lab at Yale University. She is focusing on using single-cell genomic approaches to understand HIV-1 persistence. She is an Investigator for basic science and translational collaboration projects, such as NIH Structural Biology Center CHEETAH, NIH Martin Delaney Collaboratory BEAT HIV and REACH, a UM1, and a P01.
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    • Akiko Iwasaki, PhD

      Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Professor of Dermatology and of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, (HHMI)

      Akiko Iwasaki, Ph.D., is a Sterling Professor of Immunobiology and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology at Yale University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Canada and her postdoctoral training from the National Institutes of Health. Her research focuses on the mechanisms of immune defense against viruses at the mucosal surfaces, and the development of mucosal vaccine strategies. She is the co-Lead Investigator of the Yale COVID-19 Recovery Study, which aims to determine the changes in the immune response of people with long COVID after vaccination. Dr. Iwasaki also leads multiple other studies to interrogate the pathobiology of long COVID, both in patients, and through developing animal models of long COVID. Dr. Iwasaki was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2018, to the National Academy of Medicine in 2019, to the European Molecular Biology Organization in 2021, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
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    • Albert Ko, MD

      Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Medicine (Infectious Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Dr. Albert Icksang Ko is the Raj and Indra Nooyi Professor of Public Health at the Yale School of Public Health and a Collaborating Researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Brazilian Ministry of Health. His research centers on the health problems that have emerged as a consequence of rapid urbanization and social inequity. Dr. Ko coordinates a research program in Brazil, which focuses on delineating the role of social marginalization, urban ecology and climate in the emergence of infectious disease threats in slum communities and informal settlements. He and his team have mobilized research capacity to develop and implement community-based interventions to epidemics of meningitis, leptospirosis, dengue, Zika virus infection and associated birth defects, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Dr. Ko is also Program Director of the Fogarty/NIH Global Health Equity Scholars Program which provides research training opportunities for US and LMIC post and pre-doctoral fellows at collaborating international sites. He is a member of the WHO R&D Taskforce for Zika Virus and R&D Blueprint Working Group. During the pandemic, he served with Indra Nooyi as co-chair of Governor Lamont’s Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group. Dr. Ko continues to advise the Governor and the State on its pandemic prevention and control plan, in addition to supporting the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation in its COVID-19 response in Brazil.
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    • Priti Kumar, PhD

      Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Director of Graduate Admissions, The BBS Microbiology Track; Director, Yale Predoctoral Training Program in Virology, Virology Laboratories; Chartered Member, Study Section: NIH: NIAID- AIDS Discovery And Development Of Therapeutics, National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institutes of Health

      Dr. Priti Kumar received her PhD in Immunology from Indian Institute of Science in the year 2002. After completing her postdoctoral studies from Harvard Medical School, she joined as an Assistant Professor at Yale University in the year 2008. Currently, she is Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases at Yale University School of Medicine. Her laboratory conducts translational research with a focus on treatment of diseases caused by RNA viruses. For the last 12 years as faculty at Yale, she made key contributions towards the development and testing of gene therapy and cure based approaches that overcome in vivo biological barriers to enable the use of next-generation biologicals like nucleic acids such as siRNA, nucleases such as recombinases and CRISPRs and antibodies with effector function for their therapeutic potential against viruses like HIV-1, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis virus, dengue and now, SARS-COV2. Her laboratory is well-recognized for studies on HIV-1 in state-of-the-art humanized mouse models that allow characterization of virus pathogenesis in the context of a human immune system. Her laboratory also conducts pioneering research on live-imaging pathogenesis of infectious viruses in small animal models.
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    • Maudry Laurent-Rolle, MD, PhD, BS

      Assistant Professor

      Dr. Maudry Laurent-Rolle received her B.S. from Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus in Biology in 2001. She then obtained her MD and PhD from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her dissertation research was funded by an NIH pre-doctoral fellowship, which allowed her to examine the molecular mechanisms by which flaviviruses inhibit host innate immune responses.  She completed residency training in Internal Medicine at Albert Einstein/Montefiore Medical Center in 2016 then joined the Infectious Diseases Fellowship program here at Yale University. Her research focus is on vaccine design and development of antivirals. She is originally from the beautiful Caribbean island of Dominica, known for its many rivers, tropical rainforests, and natural hot springs.
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    • Jun Liu, PhD

      Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis

      Dr. Liu has been working in the field of electron microscopy for 20 years. In particular, he gained expertise in cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) after working with Prof. Ken Taylor at Florida State University and Dr. Sriram Subramaniam at NIH. Since he started his own laboratory in 2007, he has been dedicated to developing high-throughput cryo-ET pipeline in which both data collection and image analysis are streamlined and automated. The high-throughput cryo-ET pipeline is becoming increasingly powerful, enabling his laboratory to visualize over 100,000 cells from 100 different bacterial species. More importantly, the massive data from cryo-ET has been systematically utilized to gain structural insights into fundamental biological processes related to signaling transduction, flagellar assembly, protein secretion, phage adsorption DNA translocation, and host-pathogen interactions. Dr. Liu has published more than 60 papers in journals that include Nature, Science, PNAS, and Cell.
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    • Carolina Lucas

      Assistant Professor; Assistant Professor, Immunobiology; Affiliated Faculty, Center for Infection and Immunity; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Carolina Lucas PhD is an Assistant Professor of Immunobiology and a member of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Yale University. She received her Ph.D. from UFRJ/ETH in Brazil and Switzerland and completed her postdoctoral training at Yale in Dr. Akiko Iwasaki Lab studying emerging virus pathogenesis, including Zika virus, CHIKV and SARS-CoV-2. The Lucas Lab is dedicated to understanding basic immune mechanisms necessary for controlling emerging viral infections and to lay the groundwork for new therapeutic approaches and vaccination strategies. Specifically, the lab explores immune responses following vaccination or infection that contribute to both resistance and disease tolerance mechanisms across different age groups.
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    • John MacMicking, PhD

      Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and of Immunobiology; Member, Yale Systems Biology Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute

      John MacMicking is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator, Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Professor of Immunobiology. He trained in synthetic organic chemistry at the Australian National University (B.Sc, 1st Class Honors) where he conducted thesis work in the Department of Immunology & Cell Biology formerly headed by 1996 Nobel Laureate, Peter Doherty, at the John Curtin School of Medical Research. He then came to the U.S. to pursue Ph.D studies with Carl Nathan in the Immunology program at Cornell University-Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City before being selected as an HHMI Life Science Research Foundation Fellow at The Rockefeller University to conduct studies with John McKinney. His doctoral dissertation described the first knockout of an interferon (IFN)-induced defense protein in eukaryotes - inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) - engineered between 1992-1995. It served as an early paradigm for cell-autonomous innate immunity to bacterial, viral and protozoan infections. At Rockefeller University he computationally identified, physically mapped and began functionally characterizing a complete IFN-inducible GTPase superfamily in humans and mice as a new defense network operating against all pathogen classes. For these discoveries he was named a Edward Mallinckrodt Jr Foundation Fellow (2004), Searle Scholar (2005), Cancer Research Institute Investigator (2006), Burroughs-Wellcome Fund Investigator (2008), CCFA Senior Research Awardee (2010), AAF Scholar (2014), and Kenneth Rainin Foundation Innovator (2014). In 2022, he received the Alumni Award of Distinction (Medical Sciences) from Cornell University. Dr. MacMicking was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010 and tenured in 2014. He was chosen as an HHMI Investigator in 2015 before moving to the Yale Systems Biology Institute in 2017.
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    • I. George Miller Jr, MD

      John F. Enders Professor of Pediatrics (Infectious Disease) and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry

      Dr. Miller’s laboratory studies the mechanisms underlying the switch between latency and lytic replication of two oncogenic herpesviruses, Epstein-Barr virus and Kaposi’s sarcoma-associated herpesvirus. Current experiments explore how viral and cellular transcription factors that selectively bind to methylated DNA control expression of viral and cellular genes, how cellular gene expression is selectively inhibited while viral gene expression is enhanced, and how viral DNA replication is regulated by cellular proteins. Recent studies focus on a new class of anti-viral agents that inhibit reactivation of Epstein-Barr virus from latency into lytic infection.
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    • Kathryn Miller-Jensen, PhD

      Professor

      Dr. Miller-Jensen is working on systems-scale approaches to study immune cell heterogeneity with a focus macrophage innate immune cells. Macrophages are critical for healthy tissue function and are also an important emerging target for cancer immunotherapy. Other areas of interest include the role of cell-to-cell heterogeneity in latent HIV infection in T cells.
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    • Walther Mothes, PhD

      Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine and Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis

      Dr. Mothes studied chemistry (Diploma 1993) and received a Ph.D. in cell biology (Humboldt-University Berlin, 1998) for his studies on protein secretion and membrane protein integration at the endoplasmic reticulum under the mentorship of Dr. Tom Rapoport at Harvard Medical School. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. John Young and James Cunningham on retroviral entry before he started his own laboratory at Yale University in 2001. Dr. Mothes received Tenure in 2011, was promoted to Full Professor in 2016, and became the Paul B. Beeson Professor of Medicine in 2021.
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    • Christian Schlieker, PhD

      Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Professor of Cell Biology

      Christian Schlieker is an expert in dissecting cellular etiology of movement disorders, with a focus on nuclear compartmentalization and liquid-liquid phase separation. After undergraduate studies at the University of Bonn/Germany and the University of New South Wales in Sydney/Australia, Dr. Schlieker performed his PhD in Bernd Bukau’s laboratory at the Center for Molecular Biology in Heidelberg, Germany. Here, he employed biochemical and biophysical tools to define the mechanism of Clp/HSP100 AAA+ ATPases in counteracting proteotoxic protein accumulation. He then joined the laboratory of Hidde Ploegh at Harvard Medical School and the Whitehead Institute/MIT, where he worked on the ubiquitin/proteasome system and identified a novel role for a Ubiquitin-related modifier in RNA modification. Dr. Schlieker joined the Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University in 2009, where he currently is Professor and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Cell Biology. Dr. Schlieker received several awards including an NIH Director New Innovator award. He served on the scientific advisory board of the Dystonia Medical Research Foundation and numerous national and international review panels, including NIH (NCSD), DOD (Clinical Trial Neurological Disorders review panel) and the European Research council, amongst others. At Yale, Dr. Schlieker served as chair of the committee of majors for Yale College, and is presently co-director of the Biochemistry, Quantitative Biology, Biophysics and Structural Biology graduate program and a member of the Advisory Board of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery.
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    • Richard Sutton, MD/PhD

      Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Chief, Infectious Diseases at VACT

      After finishing his undergraduate studies at Brown University, Dr. Sutton enrolled in the MSTP at Stanford, where he obtained his PhD degree with Dr. John Boothroyd, working on trans-splicing in African trypanosomes. He then completed a categorical residency in internal medicine at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania and a fellowship in infectious diseases at UCSF. After post-doctoral stints with Drs. Harold Varmus, Dan Littman, and Pat Brown in which he worked on HTLV cell binding and entry and the development of HIV-based gene therapy vectors, he joined the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine. In 2008 he was recruited to Yale to continue his work on HIV replication and lentiviral vectors. Dr. Sutton spends approximately 50% of his time at the research bench and 25% in the clinical setting, both out-patient and in-patient, mainly at the West Haven VA (VACT). He now the Research Chief of Infectious Diseases at VACT, which takes up 25% of his time. Dr. Sutton was the Chief of Infectious Diseases at VACT from 2013-2024. Dr. Sutton took an administrative leave of absence in mid-April 2022, but he resumed all of his clinical, educational, and research activities before the beginning of 2023.
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    • Jeffrey Townsend, PhD

      Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology; Co-Leader, Genomics, Genetics, & Epigenetics Research Program

      Professor Townsend received his Ph.D. in 2002 in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University, under the advisement of Daniel Hartl. His Ph.D. was entitled "Population genetic variation in genome-wide gene expression: modeling, measurement, and analysis", and constituted the first population genetic analysis of genome-wide gene expression variation. After making use of the model budding yeast S. cerevisiae for his Ph.D. research, Dr. Townsend accepted an appointment as a Miller Fellow at the University of California-Berkeley in the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, where he worked to develop molecular tools, techniques, and analysis methodologies for functional genomics studies with the filamentous fungal model species Neurospora crassa, co-advised by Berkeley fungal evolutionary biologist John Taylor and molecular mycologist Louise Glass. In 2004, he accepted his first appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of Connecticut. In 2006 he was appointed as an Assistant Professor the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. In 2013 he began to work on statistical approaches to fit mathematical models of disease spread and emergence, and to work on the somatic evolution of cancer, and was appointed as an Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In 2017 he was named Elihu Associate Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and in 2018 he was appointed Elihu Professor of Biostatistics and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology. In 2019 he was appointed a member of the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, in recognition of the development of innovative approaches to population biology, including the evolution of antimicrobial resistance, disease evolution and transmission, and evolution of tumorigenesis; and research that has enabled curtailment of pathogen evolution, outbreak mitigation, and informed therapeutic approaches to cancer metastasis and evolution of therapeutic resistance in cancer. In 2021 he was selected as the Co-Chair-Elect of the Cancer Evolution Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research. In 2022 he was appointed Co-Director of the Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics Program of the Yale Cancer Center. In 2023 he was elevated to Co-Chair of the Cancer Evolution Working Group of the American Association for Cancer Research.
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    • Chantal Vogels, PhD

      Assistant Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliate Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health. I have a background in ecology, medical entomology, virology, and genomics. During my PhD at Wageningen University & Research, I studied the role of Culex pipiens mosquitoes in transmission of West Nile virus in Europe. My interdisciplinary project involved local mosquito surveillance in the field, vector competence studies in the laboratory, and modeling. These studies led to important insights in the role of climate as a limiting factor to transmission of West Nile virus in Europe. During my postdoc at the Yale School of Public Health, I shifted my focus to using genomics to understand the role of virus evolution in the unexpected scale and severity of the Zika virus epidemic in the Americas. Using a reverse genetics platform, we engineered Zika virus mutations and determined their impact on transmission by Aedes aegypti mosquitoes in the laboratory. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I temporarily shifted my research focus to utilize my expertise in molecular virology and genomics to respond to a global public health emergency. Our team led the laboratory development of a saliva-based test called SalivaDirect that received Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and we established the Yale SARS-CoV-2 Genomic Surveillance Initiative through which >25,000 SARS-CoV-2 samples were sequenced. Building on these experiences, we recently developed amplicon sequencing approaches for emerging viruses (i.e., human monkeypox virus) and arboviruses (i.e., dengue virus and Powassan virus) to uncover their patterns of emergence and spread. In the Vogels Lab, we use experimental approaches to study the ecology, evolution, and epidemiology of arthropod-borne (arbo)viruses. By combining field, laboratory, and computational approaches, we investigate how complex interactions between arboviruses, their vectors, and the environment influence their transmission dynamics. Our goal is to increase our understanding of the drivers and barriers of arbovirus transmission to improve prevention and control strategies.
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    • Craig B. Wilen, MD, PhD

      Associate Professor Term; Medical Director, Immune Monitoring Core Facility

      Dr. Wilen is an Associate Professor in Laboratory Medicine and Immunobiology and is focused on the host-pathogen interactions of RNA viruses including coronavirus and norovirus. Dr. Wilen received his A.B in Biology and Economics at Washington University in St. Louis, his MD and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. His residency training was in clinical pathology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis, MO. His postdoctoral studies were conducted in the laboratory of Herbert "Skip" Virgin at Washington University School of Medicine where he studied the pathogenesis of norovirus, the leading cause of acute gastroenteritis. Dr. Wilen discovered CD300lf as the first receptor for a norovirus and identified intestinal tuft cells as the physiologic target cell for mouse norovirus infection. Current work in the Wilen lab is focused on identifying mechanisms of immunity and pathogenesis for noroviruses, coronaviruses, and pre-emergent viruses with pandemic potential. The goals of this work are to enable improved risk stratification and to develop improved therapeutics and vaccines to reduce the disease burden from viruses. https://wilenlab.com
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    • Yong Xiong, PhD

      Professor

      Dr. Xiong’s research focuses on structural and biochemical studies of virus suppression by host antiviral factors and viral immune evasion. Dr. Xiong also investigates cellular DNA repair pathways.
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  • PhD Faculty - Parasitology

    • Serap Aksoy, PhD

      Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Professor Aksoy is a tropical medicine researcher whose work focuses on the epidemiology of insect transmitted (vector borne) and zoonotic diseases.  Her research has been on tsetse flies and the pathogenic parasites they transmit that cause highly neglected and fatal diseases of humans in Africa, known as Sleeping Sickness. Her laboratory focuses on deciphering the vector-parasite molecular dialogue and parasite development during the transmission process with the ultimate goal of identifying novel targets of interference and developing transmission blocking vaccines to reduce disease.  Her fundamental and interdisciplinary work on tsetse and its microbial symbionts has identified key principles that shape host-microbe interactions. Her studies with tsetse's mutualistic microbes identified nutritional contributions that facilitate female fecundity and mediate host immune system development. Her studies with tsetse's commensal microbiota led to a novel biological method, coined as paratransgenesis, in which anti-parasitic molecules are synthesized in the beneficial gut microbes, thus making the gut environment inhospitable for disease causing parasites. Ability to spread such modified microbes into natural insect populations is being explored to reduce disease transmission as a novel biological method.Dr. Aksoy maintains collaborative research activities with Yale researchers as well as with multiple universities and research institutes in Africa. Their studies in Kenya and Uganda investigate the epidemiology of Sleeping Sickness disease, with a focus on understanding the major drivers that sustain disease transmission, as well as on population genetics of flies and parasites and their microbiota. She initiated and led a large international consortium that eventually sequenced the genome of six tsetse fly species. This effort vastly expanded molecular knowledge and genomic resources on this neglected disease vector, and collectively expanded research capacity in bioinformatics and functional biology in many laboratories in sub-Sahara Africa. As the co-editor in Chief of the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases between 2007-2020, she has been a major voice for building research and publication capacity for global neglected tropical diseases.  Throughout her professional career, Aksoy has been an advocate of and innovator in Global Health; served as a dedicated mentor to students and scientists in the US and in Africa, China, Italy and Turkey helping to prepare the next generation of leaders in the fields of epidemiology and zoonotic disease control.
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    • Amy Bei, PhD

      Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Mircrobial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Dr. Bei’s research interests in Plasmodium – the causative agent of malaria -  lie at the intersection between population genetics, genomics, molecular genetics, epidemiology, and immunology.  Her current research uses a translational systems biology approach to study the impact of antigenic diversity on immune evasion, transmission, and virulence in setting of declining malaria transmission.  She is studying the development of genotype-specific and genotype-transcendent immunity and assess the effect of specific persisting genotypes on neutralizing humoral immune responses and their transmission potential in the mosquito vector.  She also works on malaria vaccine candidate discovery and validation, studying the functional consequences of naturally arising diversity.  Dr. Bei has ongoing research projects in Senegal in addition to many active collaborations in Sub-Saharan African countries in both East and West Africa.
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    • Richard Bucala, MD, PhD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Rheumatology) and Professor of Pathology and of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Chief, Rheumatology, Allergy, & Immunology; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Rheumatologist in Chief, Rheumatology, YNHH

      Richard Bucala, MD, PhD, is Chief, Section of Rheumatology, Allergy & Immunology and the Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Endowed Professor of Medicine, Pathology, and Epidemiology & Public Health. He studies the regulation of the immune system with a focus on how protective responses can lead to immunopathology and disease. His laboratory’s main emphasis is MIF-family cytokines, their role in genetic susceptibility to disease, and their therapeutic targeting for different clinical conditions. The Bucala group is credited with the molecular cloning of MIF and discovery of its critical role in regulating glucocorticoid immunosuppression, which opened novel approaches to therapy in autoimmune inflammatory conditions. His lab also identified the MIF receptor and discovered common polymorphisms in the MIF gene, which show global population stratification. Depending on the nature of the immune or invasive provocation, variant MIF alleles protect from disease or contribute to immunopathology in autoimmunity and in different infections and chronic conditions. His laboratory developed biochips for genetic epidemiology studies of malaria and tuberculosis in resource-limited settings, and his research is leading efforts to develop MIF-based therapies tailored to an individual’s genetic makeup. Dr. Bucala licensed anti-MIF toward the development of Imalumab and his work contributed to the FDA-approved anti-MIF receptor antibody (Milatuzumab). Research partnerships in structure-based drug design have led to novel small molecule MIF modulators for use in autoimmune, oncologic, and infectious diseases. The function of the MIF-like genes expressed by the parasites responsible for malaria, leishmaniasis, and helminthic infection also are under investigation. As these proteins were discovered to uniquely suppress immunologic memory, they offer new targets for vaccination against these infections. Dr. Bucala further is credited with the discovery of the circulating fibrocyte, which is being targeted therapeutically in different fibrosing disorders. He co-founded two biotechnology companies, including the startup MIFCOR begun as a student-advised project. He attends in the Yale New Haven Health System in-patient service and is the past Editor-in-Chief of Arthritis & Rheumatology. Dr. Bucala was elected to the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians and has served on advisory boards for the UN, the federal government, the pharmaceutical industry, academia, and private foundations.
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    • Michael Cappello, MD

      Department Chair and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Professor of Pediatrics (Infectious Disease) and Microbial Pathogenesis; Interim Director, Yale Institute for Global Health; Associate Director, MD-PhD Program

      Michael Cappello MD is Professor and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology of Microbial Diseases at the Yale School of Public Health, and Professor of Pediatrics and Microbial Pathogenesis at Yale Medical School. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in Biomedical Ethics and received his MD from Georgetown University in Washington, DC. After training in adult and Pediatric infectious diseases at Yale, Dr. Cappello joined the faculty in 1995, where he oversees a laboratory and field based research program focused on global health, tropical medicine and molecular parasitology. He is a 2007 recipient of the Bailey K. Ashford medal, awarded by the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene “for distinguished work in tropical medicine.” In addition to research, Dr. Cappello provides clinical care as an Infectious Diseases specialist at Yale New Haven Children’s Hospital. He is co-founder of the Yale Partnerships for Global Health, an initiative that advances scientific knowledge, promotes international understanding, and builds human capacity through collaborative research and training. From 2007-15, Dr. Cappello directed the Yale World Fellows Program, a multi-disciplinary, campus-wide initiative whose mission is to cultivate and inspire a global network of leaders committed to positive change. From 2016-21, he chaired the Council on African Studies at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and was faculty director of the Yale Africa Initiative. Dr. Cappello is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and serves on the Academic Advisory Council of Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
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    • Erol Fikrig, MD

      Waldemar Von Zedtwitz Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Professor of Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases) and of Microbial Pathogenesis; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health; Section Chief, Infectious Diseases, Internal Medicine

      My laboratory investigates vector-borne diseases. Studies are directed toward understanding Lyme disease, flaviviral infections including dengue and West Nile viruses, and malaria. Efforts on Lyme disease include exploring immunity to Borrelia burgdorferi, selective B. burgdorferi gene expression in vivo, and the immunobiology of Lyme arthritis. Flaviviruses and Plasmodium are used as models  to understand the molecular interactions between pathogens, their arthropod vectors and their mammalian hosts. Finally, we are developing new  approaches to prevent ticks and mosquitoes from feeding on a vertebrate host, thereby interfering with pathogen transmission.
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    • Paul Turner, PhD

      Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

      Dr. Paul Turner is the Rachel Carson Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, and Microbiology faculty member at Yale School of Medicine. He obtained a BA in Biology (1988) from University of Rochester, a PhD in Microbial Evolution (1995) from Michigan State University, and did postdocs at National Institutes of Health, University of Valencia in Spain, and University of Maryland-College Park, before joining Yale in 2001. Dr. Turner studies evolutionary genetics of viruses, particularly phages that infect bacterial pathogens and RNA viruses transmitted by arthropods, and researches the use of phages to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial diseases. He is very active in science-communication outreach to the general public, and is involved in programs where faculty collaborate with K-12 teachers to improve STEMM education in underserved public schools. Dr. Turner’s service includes the National Science Foundation’s Bio Advisory Committee, and his honors include Fellowship in the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts & Sciences, and American Academy of Microbiology.
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    • Joseph Vinetz, MD, FACP, FIDSA, FASTMH, BS

      Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Anthropology, and Epidemiology (Microbial Diseases); Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Dr. Vinetz is Professor of Medicine in the Section of Infectious Diseases. He is also Research Professor in the Faculty of Sciences and Laboratory of Research and Development at Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, and Associated Investigator of the Alexander von Humboldt Institute of Tropical Medicine at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia, in Lima, Peru. He received his Bachelor of Science from Yale University and received his M.D. from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He completed a residency in internal medicine and a fellowship in infectious diseases at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, during which time he was a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Physician Postdoctoral Fellow at the National Institutes of Health. He is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the Association of American Physicians, and an elected Fellow of the American College of Physicians, the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. His research in global health and infectious diseases is problem-based and applies fundamental laboratory approaches. This work is based in his lab at Yale and in the field in Peru, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. His scholarship focuses on public health issues of highest consequence, while simultaneously pursuing basic and translational research from the bench to the bedside. His research has been continuously funded by the NIH since 2001, and by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Rockefeller Brothers Fund/Culpeper Scholarship, the World Health Organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Americas Foundation, with an expanding, internationally-based portfolio.
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  • PhD Faculty - Microbiome

    • Vanessa Ezenwa, PhD

      Professor; Affiliated Faculty, Yale Institute for Global Health

      Dr. Vanessa Ezenwa is a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University. She received a BA in Biology from Rice University, and PhD in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University. She completed postdocs at Princeton and the U.S. Geological Survey. Before joining the Yale faculty in 2021, she was a Professor of Ecology and Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia. Dr. Ezenwa’s research focuses on the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases in wild animal populations, and she studies how within-host interactions between hosts and pathogens translate to larger-scale epidemiological patterns. She has received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, a Zoetis Award for Veterinary Research Excellence, and a Fulbright Scholar Award. She is also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Ezenwa mentors undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral researchers and served as founding director of the Interdisciplinary Disease Ecology Across Scales (IDEAS) PhD training program at the University of Georgia from 2015-2021.
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    • Andrew Goodman, PhD

      C.N.H. Long Professor of Microbial Pathogenesis and Director of Microbial Sciences Institute; Chair, Microbial Pathogenesis

      Andrew L. Goodman, PhD, is the C. N. H. Long Professor and Chair of the Department of Microbial Pathogenesis and Director of the Yale Microbial Sciences Institute. Goodman received his undergraduate degree in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Princeton University, his PhD in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics from Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral training at Washington University. His lab uses microbial genetics, gnotobiotics, and mass spectrometry to understand how gut microbes interact with their host during health and disease. The lab is also interested in how the microbiome impacts the efficacy and toxicity of medical drugs. The lab’s contributions have been recognized by the NIH Director New Innovator Award, the Pew Foundation, the Dupont Young Professors Award, the Burroughs Wellcome Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholars Program, the ASPET John J. Abel Award, and the Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering.
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    • Caroline Helen Johnson, PhD

      Associate Professor of Epidemiology (Environmental Health Sciences)

      Caroline H. Johnson, PhD, is a Tenured Associate Professor of Epidemiology in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at Yale School of Public Health. She graduated from Imperial College London in 2009 with a PhD in Analytical Chemistry. Since then she has held postdoctoral and staff appointments at the National Cancer Institute and The Scripps Research Institute. Dr. Johnson's research uses mass spectrometry-based metabolomics to understand the role of metabolites in human health. Her primary research interest is to investigate the relationship between genetic and environmental influences (diet, hormones and microbiome) in colon cancer. She is also examining exposures during pregnancy.
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    • Liza Konnikova, MD/PhD, FAAP

      Associate Professor; CyTOF Core Director, Medicine

      Dr. Konnikova's team focuses on the development of early life immunity particularly at barrier sites such as the GI tract and the maternal-fetal interface with a particular focus on T cell biology. Using multi-omic approaches, the group investigates how mucosal homeostasis is developed and what contributes to pathogenesis of diverse diseases such as sepsis, preterm labor, necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC), very early onset (VEO) and pediatric IBD. The Konnikova lab is further interested in how the microbiome and the associated metabolome regulate immune development and homeostasis at barrier sites. Her group is also interested in how early life events alter circulating immune cells. To this end, in collaboration with the NOuRISH team they are enrolling infants in a longitudinal study of peripheral blood development.
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    • Noah Wolcott Palm, PhD

      Professor

      Noah W. Palm is a Professor of Immunobiology at the Yale University School of Medicine. His laboratory focuses on illuminating the myriad interactions between the immune system and the gut microbiota in health and disease. Dr. Palm performed his doctoral work with Ruslan Medzhitov and his postdoctoral work with Richard Flavell, both at Yale University.
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