Author: Rachel Meade

The Smith Lab is thrilled to welcome Oyindamola Adefisayo, Ph.D. and Kaley Wilburn, Ph.D. as our very first postdoctoral associates!

Oyinda joins us from the Glickman lab at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she fully characterized the contributions of the DNA damage response pathways in mycobacteria to antibiotic resistance and mutagenesis. Kaley completed her Ph.D. in the VanderVen lab at Cornell University, where she studied how Mycobacterium tuberculosis utilizes host lipids as carbon sources during infection and sought to characterize mechanisms to leverage these pathways as antibiotic targets.

Both Kaley and Oyinda look forward to leveraging their formidable mycobacterial expertise within the context of genetically diverse hosts, combining next-generation host and bacterial approaches to reveal novel host-pathogen interactions.

The Smith lab hosted Emma Heckenberg as the second rotation student this fall. Emma is a first-year Ph.D. student in the MGM graduate training program.

During her Smith lab rotation, Emma worked on a collaboration with the Coers lab elaborating the role of immunity-related GTPase M (IRGM) genes on tuberculosis pathogenesis. With a passion for wet lab experimentation, Emma dove into biosafety level-3 (BSL3) work, learning mouse husbandry, BSL3 safety and methods, and infected animal experimentation. Throughout her rotation, Emma collaborated with Carissa Harvest in the Miao Lab to kick start a staining protocol in the Smith lab and also garnered a new set of data tidying and exploration skills in R.

The Smith lab will miss Emma’s infectious excitement for science and wishes her well in her future rotations!

The Smith Lab concluded a year of excellent rotations by hosting Margaret Gaggioli as a rotation student this spring.

Originally from southeastern Wisconsin, Margaret moved to St. Louis, Missouri in 2015 for her undergraduate education. TB research was not new to her, as she spent 2.5 years in Dr. Christina Stallings’ lab as an undergraduate and post-baccalaureate researcher studying the host myeloid cell response to Mycobacteria tuberculosis infection. During her time at Duke, Margaret is interested in continuing to investigate the pathogenesis of infectious diseases, focusing on host-pathogen interactions.

Margaret took a new angle on her rotation project and made her mark on the direction of investigation. Margaret studied host genetic determinants of tuberculosis tolerance among Collaborative Cross mice and began to ask questions about inflammatory signaling and cachexia during M. tuberculosis infection. After completing her training in the BSL-3 laboratory, she cultured spleens to quantify bacterial burden and conduct QTL mapping to identify causal host genes. After her rotation, Margaret will be joining the Ko lab, and we look forward to all of the things she will accomplish during her time at Duke!

The Smith Lab enjoyed hosting Emily Engeman as a rotation student this spring.

A local to the area, Emily attended North Carolina State University in Raleigh for her undergraduate education, where she studied biology and minored in business administration. After graduating in 2017, Emily moved to Washington, D.C. to research HIV in Dr. Sodsai Tovanabutra’s lab at the Walter Reed Army Institute for Research (WRAIR). Her primary research focuses involved investigating HIV mutations and coreceptor usage. In 2019, Emily accepted an ORISE fellowship at WRAIR to work with Dr. Anna Jacobs. In Emily’s fellowship program, she worked to develop a robotic biofilm assay and researched phage antibiotic synergy in vitro and in a mouse wound model. Now pursuing her Ph.D. at Duke, Emily is excited to study host pathogen interactions and investigate potential therapeutics.

How can a host with very low levels of infection look and act like a host with severe TB? This is a question Emily set out to answer in her rotation, which centered on host genetic determinants of tuberculosis tolerance in the Collaborative Cross panel. Throughout her rotation, she studied the immunological dynamics and mechanisms of disease tolerance in mammalian hosts while completing her training in the BSL-3 laboratory. We look forward to seeing the awesome scientific questions she’ll pursue throughout her graduate studies at Duke!

The Smith Lab is excited to virtually welcome the 2021 UPGG, MGM, and CMB recruits!

Recruits that are interested in working on one of the world’s deadliest pathogens should feel free to reach out to us to chat science, lab culture, and life in RDU!

The Smith Lab was excited to host Aruna Menon as a rotation student this fall.

Aruna received her B.S. in Microbiology from UC Berkeley in 2018. During this time, she fell in love with the diversity of microbes as well as the tools used to understand microbial communities. Through her undergraduate education and years as a lab tech, she solidified her love of science and research.  As she begins her Ph.D. at Duke, she is excited to learn more about how chemistry, genetics, and bacterial physiology intersect to play a role in infectious disease.

Aruna’s joint rotation between the Smith Lab and the Tobin Lab down the hall allowed her to study of tuberculosis in both mouse and zebrafish models. Throughout her rotation, she studied macrophage recruitment and the ESX secretion system in mycobacteria. We look forward to seeing all that she will accomplish during her time at Duke!

Smith Lab is tuning in during the very first online broadcast of The Allied Genetics Conference! Clare enjoyed moderating the session on “Modeling Human Diseases in Diverse Systems.”

We are so thankful to the Genetics Society of America and other organizers for converting the talks and posters to the virtual format at such a fast pace, setting the standard for science accessibility in the future!

 

Smith Lab is all bunkered up at home to work on dry lab projects! With our brand new tech Kelli Walters and rotation student Hannah Schmidt, we’re excited to continue mapping clinical traits in various mouse panels, processing transposon sequencing data from Mtb library infections, and clustering host and pathogen traits via Weighted Gene Correlation Network Analysis (WGCNA), all in our PJs!

Looking forward to starting wet lab as soon as this is all over!

Hope everyone is staying home and social distancing. We will push through COVID19 together.

This week, Smith Lab presented for the very first time in joint lab meeting with Tobin Lab and Coers Lab! Rachel presented on the first 6 weeks of her rotation, and Erin made stellar eclairs!

Lab meeting was a hit! Excited for an eventful month ahead!