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Designing Microbial Therapeutics for Vaginal Health – Tufts University’s Fatima Aysha Hussain, PhD

Date: May 29, 2025
Time: 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location: Hybrid: In-Person and Zoom (Audience limited to Tufts Members and Affiliates; please contact CIMAR@tufts.edu for more details.)
Levy CIMAR Science Lunch

Please Join us for a Levy CIMAR seminar from Fatima Aysha Hussain, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Biology at Tufts studying the ecology and evolution of the vaginal microbiome. Dr. Hussain will present on “Designing Microbial Therapeutics for Vaginal Health” on May 29th at 12 noon in M&V 412 and by Zoom (details to come).

Dr. Hussain is interested in microbe-microbe interactions and phage-driven evolution of bacteria. She and her lab investigate how phages drive evolution of resistance in their hosts, how bacteriocins and other antimicrobial compounds shape the bacterial community, and how phage therapy might be leveraged in this ecosystem to treat microbial syndromes such as bacterial vaginosis. Dr. Hussain and team aim to use their work to design ecologically-informed microbial therapeutics for women’s health.

Previously, Dr. Hussain focused on clinical applications of this work—investigating the potential of newly-designed probiotics and vaginal microbiota transplantations to treat recurrent bacterial vaginosis.

You can learn more about Dr. Hussain and her lab via her website.

Past Events:

Our April 24th Levy CIMAR Science Seminar will explore C. difficile from both clinical and basic science perspectives. We will hear from two speakers this month: Tufts Medical Center’s Majd (Soubani) Alsoubani, MD, MPH, an Attending Physician with expertise in antimicrobial stewardship and infections in immunocompromised hosts, and Greg Harrison, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of CIMAR’s Aimee Shen, PhD, studying the molecular machinery that is required for cell division in C. diff and working to identify novel therapeutic targets to combat this dangerous pathogen.

Please join us on Thursday, April 24th, at 12 noon in M&V 412 (4th floor, M&V Building, 136 Harrison Ave., Boston) and by Zoom (details to come).

Dr. Alsoubani will present on “Evaluating the role of Clostridioides difficile clades and ribotypes on clinical outcomes and response to treatment.“ The talk will include data on the impact of C. difficile strains on clinical outcomes.

Dr. Harrison will present on “Defining the essential role of PBP1 in the non-canonical divisome of Clostridioides difficile.C. difficile carries out the essential process of cell division using a mechanism that is fundamentally different from previously studied bacteria, so this pathway could be a source of new species-specific therapeutic targets. This talk will explore Dr. Harrison’s work on understanding the molecular details of cell division in C. difficile, including the critical role of the enzyme PBP1.

We are excited to welcome C. Brandon Ogbunu, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale University and External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, to present on “The Panorama: Lessons for Epidemiology, Evolution, and a Science in Peril” for a Black History Month seminar sponsored jointly by Micro DEI, the Levy CIMAR, and the Tufts Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. This talk will take place on Thursday, February 27th, 2025, at 12 Noon both in person and by Zoom (details to come).

Dr. Ogbunu is a computational biologist whose research investigates complex problems in epidemiology, population genetics, and social phenomena. His work utilizes a range of methods, from experimental evolution, to biochemistry, applied mathematics, and data science to better understand the underlying causes and consequences of disease across scales—from the biophysics of proteins involved in drug resistance to the social determinants driving epidemics at the population level. He has recently analyzed how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated racial inequities in incarceration (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05980-2) and how birds can be long-range vectors for infectious disease (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36792882/). You can learn more about Dr. Ogbunu and the Ogbunu Lab here.

This talk will be hosted by Aimee Shen, PhD, PhD Candidate Adrianne Gladden-Young, and Micro DEI.

Please join us for a seminar from Tufts Medicine’s Edouard Vannier, PharmD, PhD, on “Persistent Babesiosis: from Immune Deficiency to Antimicrobial Resistance.” Babesiosis is a sometimes life-threatening infectious disease caused by parasites that invade and destroy red blood cells. Babesiosis has been on the rise in the northeastern United States and often develops following the bite of a deer tick infected with Babesia microti. This talk is jointly sponsored by the Levy CIMAR and the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative, and will take place on Thursday, October 31, at 12 noon in Behrakis Auditorium and by Zoom (details to come).

Dr. Vannier is an assistant professor at Tufts University’s School of Medicine and a researcher in the Division of Geographic Medicine & Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center. He is also a member of the Tufts Lyme Disease Initiative. Dr. Vannier and his colleagues are doing research on how to prevent babesiosis, supported by the NIH and DoD.

You can learn more about Dr. Vannier’s work on Tufts Medicine’s Babesiosis Research Program website.

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