ALM LAB - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lab
- Graduate Student / Department of Biological Engineering
- Research Interests
Wastewater offers a rich source of public health information. Biomarkers of infectious disease, diet, and other population health metrics are constantly shed in feces and wind up in a community's wastewater. I am interested in developing methods to use wastewater surveillance data to track infectious diseases and infer their incidence/prevalence in a population. In particular, I have been working with Alm lab members and collaborators at Biobot Analytics to track COVID-19 in wastewater across the United States and model viral shedding. I am excited to combine expertise from mechanical, electrical, and biological engineering to build a device to detect pathogens at the building level. Such a device will help apartment complexes, workplaces, and hospitals respond to outbreaks in near real time.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Associate
- Research Interests
Education
PhD, 2013, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
MsC, 2009, Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel.
BSc, 2007, BioPhysics, Bar-Ilan University, Israel.
Job Titles:
- Project Manager
- Research Interests
Education
MSc, 2013, University of Otago
BS, 2009, Eckerd College
Job Titles:
- Graduate Student / Computational and Systems Biology
- Research Interests
I study the evolution and ecology of microbial communities. Research interests include horizontal gene transfer in the human microbiome, ecosystem stability, and applying machine learning techniques to the analysis of 16S sequence data. I'm also interested in high performance computing.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Associate / Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research Interests
I am interested in how microbes survive and thrive in diverse and dynamic environments. This includes understanding how bacteria sense and respond to environmental change, the metabolic machinery required for different feeding strategies, and how microbes adapt and evolve various lifestyles.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor, Biological Engineering, MIT / Associate Member, Broad Institute
- MIT Director / Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics
- Research Interests
Education
Postdoc, 2005, University of California, Berkeley/Lawrence Berkeley National Lab
Ph.D., 2001, University of Washington, Seattle
M.S., 1997, University of California, Riverside
B.S., 1995, University of Illinois, Urbana
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lab
- Research Affiliate / Collaborator
- Research Interests
I study the ecology and evolution of microbes living in the human vagina, or the vaginal microbiome. The composition of a persons vaginal microbiome can impact their susceptibility to preterm birth, bacterial vaginosis, and HIV infection. I am collaborating with the Alm lab to build an isolate and genome collection of vaginal microbes. I aim to use genome wide association studies (GWAS) to map genotypes to phenotypes of interest and compliment this computational work with lab experiments at strain-level resolution. My expertise and focus are in (pro)phage-microbe and microbe-microbe interactions and how they shape the structure and function of microbial communities.
Education
Ph.D., Environmental Microbiology, MIT, 2020
M.S., Civil and Environmental Engineering, Stanford University, 2013
S.B., Environmental Engineering Science with minor in Women's and Gender Studies, MIT, 2011
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lab
- Postdoctoral Associate
- Research Interests
I am passionate about the damned and blessed tiny beings, also called bacteria. The ones that can cause infection and the "good ones" that keep our body healthy. I am particularly interested in infectious diseases, especially those that can spread from animals to humans, and their importance in public health. My field of expertise ranges from the mycobacteria to probiotics. I have always focused on a single, one person, one animal, but now, I am moving my attention to a population level, looking at a neighbourhood or entire cities. I am excited to work with the Alm Singaporean group to look into into new wastewater population biomarkers to study public health in cities that will help us predict an infectious disease outbreak to act promptly and maintain our population health. I am fascinated by the idea of answering the question, "is the population healthy?"
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lab
- Lab Technologist ( SMART Alm Lab )
Job Titles:
- Research Interests
- Visiting Scientist ( MIT ) and Associate Professor ( QAU - Pakistan )
Microbial communities play a pivotal role in human and animal productivity as well as overall wellbeing. Understanding and modelling the naturally occurring complex microbial communities of gut and indigenously fermented foods and might have a potential to enhance the productivity and prevent various diseases. I'm interested in the development of food and feed based bio-therapeutics with wide array of applications for human and animals. More precisely, the areas of interests are:
Job Titles:
- Graduate Student
- Research Interests
The sequencing revolution has immense promises for improving human health. In the Alm lab, I have the opportunity to apply cutting edge genomic technique to study the interplay of microbes and human diseases. One of my current work is to study the mechanism of how fecal microbiota transplant treated recurrent Clostridium difficile infection, from an ecological perspective. I am also interested in diving into the metagenomics data to characterize the dynamics of perturbed microbiome, and trying to find biomarkers for easy diagnostics. Moreover, I am involved in the Personal analytics project, which collects time-series orthogonal physiological data to enhance our understandings of chronic diseases.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lab
- Postdoctoral Fellow
- Research Interests
I study how bacterial physiology influences ecology. In the Alm Lab, I'm developing synthetic microbial communities and culturing protocols to improve experimental models of the human microbiome. This project tickles my research fancies by (1) optimizing a model system that we can controllably perturb, observe, and explain what caused what and (2) illuminating how microbial communities respond to ecological change.
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Fellow
- Research Interests
Job Titles:
- Graduate Student / Computational and Systems Biology
- Research Interests
I am broadly interested in the evolution and ecology of pathogens. In particular, I would like to utililize high performance computing to study the effect of the intricate interactions among host, bacteria, and mobile genetic elements such as phage and plasmids on disease. In my spare time, I work on strengthening my own gut microbiome by eating lots of yogurt.
Job Titles:
- Graduate Student Computational and Systems Biology
- Research Interests
Job Titles:
- Postdoctoral Associate
- Research Interests
The relationship between our health and our microbial inhabitants is poorly understood and likely to be vast in its implications. I am interested in integrating different types of physiological data that have been collected in a continuous fashion, including data pertaining to the microbiome, immune system, and metabolome, to study the dynamics of this relationship. My work concerns developing an analytics platform that would provide the infrastructure to rapidly identify novel biomarkers within the collected data. We hope that these biomarkers could then be applied rapidly and translationally to improve the lives of patients suffering from chronic diseases.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Lab
- Research Scientist
- Research Interests
I am fascinated by the myriad of disease causing microorganisms in this world and how these exist in balance with their hosts. This fascination led me, through grad school and my postdoctoral career, to work on different agents of disease - Yersinia pestis which causes the plague, sexually transmitted Chlamydia and nosocomial Enterococci. In all, I am committed to doing research that can improve public health and reduce the social and economic impact of infectious diseases.