David Andes
UW-Madison
Dr. David Andes is a faculty member and chief of the Division of Infectious Disease within the Department of Medicine, and also has an appointment in the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology. He holds the William A. Craig Endowed Professorship, and directs the Wisconsin Antimicrobial Drug Discovery and Development NIH Center of Excellence. Dr. Andes’ research programs are multidisciplinary and strive to identify strategies to combat antimicrobial (especially antifungal) drug resistance. His study tactics span from the bench to the clinic, including identifying new resistance mechanisms, defining new antimicrobial drug targets, delineating the optimal dosing strategies for treatment of drug resistant infections, and clinical trial study of epidemiology of drug resistance epidemiology.
Arturo Casadevall
Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Arturo Casadevall is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Molecular Microbiology & Immunology and Infectious Diseases at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Healthand Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and the Alfred and Jill Sommer Professor and Chair of the W. Harry Feinstone Department of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is an internationally recognized expert in infectious disease research, with a focus on fungal and bacterial pathogenesis and basic immunology of antibody structure-function. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
John MacMillan
University of California, Santa Cruz
The MacMillan lab focuses on the isolation and characterization of natural products from marine-derived bacteria that have promising biological activity. We take advantage of the broad microbial and chemical diversity of marine habitats, and the power of high-content phenotypic screening to discover and characterize novel therapeutic agents. The lab has active programs in marine microbiology, high-throughput screening (with an emphasis on oncology), cell biology, and organic/analytical chemistry. Our approach has led to the discovery of a variety of novel natural products, including discoipyrrole A and mangrolide A.
Elizabeth Shank
University of Massachusetts
Dr. Shank’s research dissects these microbial interactions using traditional microbiology, fluorescent co-culture, bioinformatics, mass spectrometry imaging, and native-like microcosms. They aim to define the molecular basis of how microbial specialized metabolites impact bacterial cellular differentiation, discover chemical tools to kill and modulate pathogens, and dynamically visualize microbial interactions at the single-cell level. In doing so, they are gaining insights into microbial ecology. They are also identifying novel bioactive compounds as potential therapeutics and chemical tools to achieve our long-term goal of manipulating microbial communities to improve host health and the environment.