I have been engaged in biomedical research for nearly 30 years with a focus on bacterial infections of the airways in persons with cystic fibrosis. My laboratory has developed novel methods of bacterial genotyping to study the molecular epidemiology of CF related respiratory tract pathogens, as well as numerous genotype-based methods for bacterial species identification. Previous work related to bacterial pathogenesis utilized cell culture and animal models of infection. My laboratory serves as a national reference laboratory for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, and maintains an extensive culture collection that includes approximately 35,000 strains of respiratory tract bacterial pathogens, including Burkholderia, Pseudomonas, Stenotrophomonas, Achromobacter, Haemophilus, Acinetobacter, and Staphylococcus spp. During the past 5 years, research in my laboratory has focused on culture-independent microbial community profiling, including use of microbiomic, transcriptomic, and metabolomic platforms, to understand the lung microbiology in CF. My laboratory has published several recent reports in this area, including our description of the decade-long dynamics of airway microbial communities in CF, which has been cited in excess of 120 times since being published in PNAS in 2012. I have supervised 14 PhD and MS/MPH students, served on another 11 PhD thesis committees, and mentored 13 post-doctoral fellows as well as numerous undergraduate and medical students. As Associate Chair for Research in the Department of Pediatrics and as Chair of the department’s Research Advisory Committee, I developed a research mentoring program for junior faculty in the Department of Pediatrics. I also serve as recruitment officer in the department’s NIH-funded Child Health Research Center (K12), working with scholars and their mentors to ensure that scholars are provided the research resources necessary to successfully transition to an independent research program.
