Join us every Friday at 12:00 p.m. EDT for BME Breaks, Columbia University's weekly webinar series hosted by the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Don't miss the opportunity each week to hear from global leaders in Biomedical Engineering research!

ABOUT THE MAY 7 WEBINAR

Systems Approaches to Host-Microbe and Microbe-Microbe Interactions within the Human Gut

My talk will cover two systems-level investigations of the genomes of microbes within the gut microbiome, both answering the question: how to the gut microbes influence human health. The first story will reveal a role for direct protein-protein interactions between human and commensal bacteria that underlie various microbiome-related health disorders (colorectal cancer, diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease and obesity). The second explores the transfer of antibiotic resistance genes within microbial community using predictive modeling. We identify specific ecological and genetic components that predict horizontal gene transfer with near-perfect accuracy. We use these models to explore the transfer between pathogens and commensals, highlighting that most predicted transfers will occur between gut-associated microbiota. 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ilana Lauren Brito, PhD
Assistant Professor, Mong Family Sesquicentennial Faculty Scholar, Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University

Ilana Brito's lab in Meinig School of Biomedical Engineering at Cornell tackles the question of how the microbiome influences human health using systems-level computational and experimental approaches. Ilana Brito received her bachelor's from Harvard University where she majored in Biology and Government. She received her PhD in Angelika Amon's lab at MIT. She then became an Earth Institute postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University, where she launched the Fiji Community Microbiome Project, aimed at discovering differences across global microbiomes and exploring the transmission of microbes within social networks. She finished her postdoc in Eric Alm's lab at MIT, before coming to Cornell University. Ilana has developed methods to de novo assemble genomes from Tb-scale datasets, link plasmids with host genomes, and spatially identify microbial species in high-throughput. Her lab now works on developing methods to probe functions within the microbiome in a high-throughput manner and algorithms to eke out as much as possible from metagenomic sequencing studies. She has received numerous accolades including an NIH New Innovator Award and fellowships from the Packard Foundation, the Sloan Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts.