The Smith Lab @ MGM

The Smith Lab are thrilled to welcome Marco Gontijo and Alwyn Ecker officially to the lab as grad students. They have done the high containment safety “bootcamp” and are embarking on their various projects leveraging diverse mice, macrophages and M. tuberculosis strains.  We are excited to see what they discover during their grad careers and beyond!

• Masked travel was back on the cards with Clare and Oyinda attending the NIAID Tuberculosis Research Unit (TBRU) network kick-off meeting meeting in Bethesda in June. Clare presented our work in the Mouse Core as part of the Myco3V team study Mycobacterial variation, vulnerability and virulence. The Myco3V team includes researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Branch Moody, Jacob Mayfield), Cornell (Kyu Rhee), Rockefeller (Jeremy Rock), University of Cape Town (Val Mizrahi, Digby Warner, Robin Wood) and University of Groningen (Aadrian Minnaard) . It was a great meeting to plan upcoming Myco3V projects and connect with new cross-TBRU collaborations. 
• Oyinda also travelled to Breckenridge in Colorado and caught up with the latest in TB research at the Keystone Symposia on Tuberculosis in August. 
• Kaley had a “summer of macrophages” where she got the ex vivo macrophage pipeline up and going in the lab and mentored undergraduate researchers on Mycobacterial and macrophage infections.
• Rachel wrapped up a manuscript and headed to San Francisco to undertake an internship as a Summer Associate at Analysis Group’s Health Economics and Outcomes Research practice. 
• Josh Tolliver came onboard as a new research technician. Josh completed his undergraduate degree at UNC Chapel Hill, where he also worked in the lab of Dr. Alan Jones and worked on projects including bacterial genetics and plant pathogenesis. Josh has quickly picked up new mammalian genetics skills in the lab and is going through the BSL3 bootcamp for work at high containment.
• Paloma Garcia is a Duke undergrad that worked in the lab this summer as part of the MGM SURE fellowship. She worked under the mentorship of Dr. Kaley Wilburn to tackle questions of Mycobacterial growth in specific host genetic backgrounds. Here, Paloma learnt Mammalian cell tissue culture and bacterial aseptic techniques. Paloma also presented her project at the annual MGM retreat where she won a poster prize. Fantastic work!

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.

Interested in a career in genetics, bioinformatics or infectious disease research? Check out this Early Career Scientist Leadership Spotlight from the Genetics Society of America (GSA) on Smith Lab PhD candidate Rachel Meade as she chats about her work on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, genetically diverse mice and gives perspectives on career options and advancing open science. Nicely done Rachel!

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 were excited to host Jessica Portillo as a rotation student this fall. Jessica came into the lab through the MGM graduate training program and as a Duke BioCoRE scholar.

In her Smith Lab rotation, Jessica was fearless in pursuit of learning the tools and approaches we use to answer questions about host-pathogen interactions in tuberculosis. She combined both wet and dry lab expertise by developing bioinformatic pipelines for data visualization and conducting M. tuberculosis infections in Biosafety Level 3 (BSL3) conditions. Her work on “non-tolerant” Collaborative Cross strains of mice uncovered new cytokines and inflammatory pathways driving hyper-inflammation during TB infection. She has created plenty of new ideas for future follow-up! 

Jessica’s long list of rotation accomplishments includes the successful completion of a week-long BSL3 biosafety bootcamp, completion of a coding bootcamp, and submission of a fellowship application. Her dedication to BSL3 work and rigorous safety protocols led to her successful completion of the Duke BSL3 mentored training on her pathway to independence. We look forward to seeing all that Jessica will achieve at Duke!