Profiles in "Bacteria" Expertise Area

  • Haydel is an infectious disease microbiologist investigating new antibiotics to fight resistant infections, new technologies to diagnose infections in less than 2 hours, and how bacteria cause disease in humans.
  • Vermaas and his team conduct basic and applied research on cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic microbes, using these organisms as a chassis to produce useful compounds (biofuels, green chemicals) from sunlight and CO2.
  • Rajeev Misra is a microbial geneticist who studies how proteins, synthesized in the cytoplasm, are targeted to the bacterial outer membrane. He also examines the mechanisms of drug resistance.
  • Yixin Shi’s research is focused on molecular biology, bacteriology and biochemistry. Shi analyzes the virulent elements necessary for bacterial survival in host environments.
  • Cheryl Nickerson studies the effects of biomechanical forces on living cells, how this response is related to normal cellular homeostasis or infectious disease, and its translation to clinical and biotechnology applications.
  • Birge is a bacterial geneticist whose research interests were the genetics of Escherichia coli and its viruses. He is no longer active in that field but penned the textbook Bacterial and Bacteriophage Genetics.
  • Bean applies bioanalytical chemistry methods to characterize microbial, human, animal, plant, and soil metabolomes to identify biomarkers of health and disease.
  • Emily is using two-dimensional gas chromatography coupled with time-of-flight mass spectrometry (GC x GC-TOFMS) to identify the volatile metabolites associated with coccidioidomycosis (Valley Fever) infection.