Featured Trainees are students, postdoctoral fellows, practicing physicians and faculty, and others who work under the tutelage of Levy CIMAR Core Faculty members and who stand out for their efforts in the fight against antimicrobial resistance. Trainees might be graduate students, antimicrobial stewards, educators, scientific researchers, medical doctors, veterinarians, pharmacists, or a combination of any of these and other professions. If you are a Levy CIMAR Core Faculty member and would like to nominate someone for “Featured Trainee” distinction, please email us any time at cimar@tufts.edu.
Summer 2020 Featured Trainee:
Iyob Gebremariam, CIMAR Software Developer
- Masters Student studying International Business at the Tufts Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy
- Software Developer working with CIMAR on Cutter and DiaMOND
Iyob Gebremariam is a software engineer currently developing CIMAR’s internal research and analytics dashboard called “Cutter.” In close collaboration with the Bree Aldridge Lab, Iyob’s work on Cutter allows scientists to streamline antimicrobial resistance research from design to analytics and visualization. Cutter also allows CIMAR to share past, present, and future research, raw data, and analytics through a standard program interface accessible to both internal and external partners.
Cutter gets its name from DiaMOND (diagonal measurement of n-way drug interactions), a new method used by the Aldridge Lab to systemically study pairwise and high-order drug combinations to develop shorter, more efficient treatment regimens for bacterial infections. Combinations of three or more drugs are used to treat many diseases, including tuberculosis, and it is important to understand how synergistic or antagonistic drug interactions affect the efficacy of combination therapies. Previously, scientists’ understanding of high-order drug interactions was limited because of the lack of both efficient measurement methods and theoretical framework for analysis and interpretation. DiaMOND provides an efficient alternative to checkerboard assays, which are commonly used to measure drug interactions. (You can learn more about DiaMOND here.)
Iyob is passionate about technology that addresses the challenges of the developing world. This, he says, is part of what piqued his interest in working on Cutter And DiaMOND. Iyob is from Ethiopia where tuberculosis continues to be a major public health challenge.
Prior to coming to Tufts and joining CIMAR, Iyob studied Computer Science at Yale University. He has over five years of experience in software development and related fields, and is currently pursuing a Masters degree in International Business from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.
In his spare time, Iyob is involved in entrepreneurship projects in Ethiopia. He enjoys history museums, soccer, and strong coffee.
Previous Featured CIMAR Trainees:
Juan A. Hernández-Bird, MERGE-ID Ph.D. Student
2019 American Society of Microbiology (ASM) Capstone Fellowship awardee and PhD Candidate in Molecular Microbiology – MERGE-ID (Medically-oriented Research in Graduate Education - Infectious Disease) track at Tufts University’s Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences
Scarlet Bliss, Undergraduate Laidlaw Fellow
Laidlaw Scholar working with CIMAR’s Drs. Amy Pickering and Carol Bascom-Slack to incorporate molecular methods into the PARE (Prevalence of Antibiotic Resistance in the Environment) project
Erica Fuhrmeister, Ph.D.
Postdoctoral Fellow, Pickering Lab, Tufts University School of Engineering; Recipient: National Science Foundation Fellowship titled, “Transfer of Antimicrobial Resistance Genes betwee
Gabriela Andujar Vazquez, M.D.
Attending physician, Division of Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases, Tufts Medical Center; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Tufts University School of Medicine; Inaugural LEAP Fellow for 2018-2019