Thursday, November 30th
12:30pm | Room 403, 4th Floor, HMS Countway Library
Georg K. Gerber, MD, PhD, MPH
Assistant Professor of Pathology, Harvard Medical School
Co-Director, Massachusetts Host-Microbiome Center
The microbiome, or microbial organisms living in and on us, play important roles in human health and disease. There is increasing interest in harnessing the microbiome for therapeutic purposes, yet analysis of these complex and inherently dynamic host-microbial ecosystems presents numerous challenges. In this talk, I will discuss novel Bayesian machine learning methods that my lab has developed to address some of these challenges, including discovery of microbial temporal signatures associated with perturbations or disease; and for optimizing the design of bacteriotherapies and predicting their dynamic behaviors in the host. If time permits, I will also outline some experimental synthetic biology approaches for high-throughput discovery of in vivo microbial functions and for engineering bacterial consortia in the mammalian gut.