Welcome!

I’m a postdoctoral scholar in the Laboratory of Prof. Ran Blekhman at the University of Chicago, where I study how the microbiome impacts health in early life leveraging strain-resolved metagenomics and multi-omics data. I am interested in understunding how the interplay between microbiome, diet, and social interactions impacts survival, growth and developmental outcomes in both human and wild animal populations. In particular, my current projects are focused on:

• Investigating the role of maternal breast milk in modulating infant health leveraging multi-omics data. Breast milk is often an infant’s sole source of nutrition during the first months of life, yet its microbial and molecular composition, and how these components influence the developing gut microbiome and infant health, remain poorly understood. My recent work, showed that microbial strains and antimicrobial resistance genes in breast milk shape the development of the infant gut microbiome and resistome. I am now expanding this research to understand how other components of breast milk influence infant health. This project is in collaboration with Prof. Ellen Demerath at the University of Minnesota.

• Investigating the transmission of the microbiome and antimicrobial resistance genes within hospitals. Hospitals represent a hotspot for the development of antimicrobial resistance and the acquisition of pathobionts during hospitalization can have serious health consequences, especially for vulnerable patients. I’m investigating how infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) acquire microbes and antimicrobial resistance genes, and the factors that shape this process. In addition, I’m studying how these dynamics are impacted by intake of maternal breast milk, donor milk, and formula. This project is in collaboration with the SET Center at the University of Chicago.

• Understanding how sociality shapes microbiome transmission, and how these dynamics impact offspring survival and long-term health across various wild animal populations. I study these processes in several long term field systems, including wolf packs in Minnesota, baboon troups in the Amboseli Ecosystem (Kenya), and rock hyrax populations in Ein Gedi (Israel). Beyond identifying novel microbial taxa in these wildlife populations, I investigate how environmental change, including increasing proximity to human settlements and contact with livestock, shapes microbiome and resistome composition and transmission.