Events Calendar: Past Events

Please join us for the first Levy CIMAR Science Seminar of 2023! We will hear from our own Claire Fellman, DVM, PhD, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Clinical Sciences at the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine on a “One Health Approach to Antimicrobial Stewardship in Companion Animals.”

A practicing small-animal internist and clinical pharmacologist, Dr. Fellman will discuss the opportunities and challenges identified during interprofessional efforts to bring successful human antimicrobial stewardship strategies to veterinary settings. Dr. Fellman’s research interests include the effects of veterinary antimicrobial use on household sharing of resistant bacteria and developing metrics and benchmarks for veterinary antimicrobial use.

Please join us on Thursday, December 15^th, our final Levy CIMAR Science Lunch of 2022! Diafuka Saila-Ngita, DVM, MSc., Ph.D., will join us to discuss “The challenge of Antibiotics Stewardship in Low Income Countries: The Case of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Dr. Saila-Ngita is a Research Associate Professor of Global Health at the Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine and an expert on resource economics with a focus on health. His research interests include antimicrobial stewardship and policy, disease surveillance systems, and disease spillover from animals and wildlife to humans.  He has more than three decades of international experience particularly in Africa spanning human, animal, and wildlife sectors, and he has worked in government, academia, NGOs, and the private sector. Dr. Saila-Ngita is also Co-Lead for surveillance, modeling, and mapping on the USAID STOP Spillover project.

Learn more about Dr. Saila-Ngita’s work here. You can also find his publications here.

Please join us for this month’s Levy CIMAR Science Seminar, presented by Trever Smith, PhD, a Research Assistant Professor in the Molecular Biology and Microbiology department at Tufts. In his research, Dr. Smith uses a combination of fluorescence microscopy, omics style data, and computational biology to understand how drugs target and kill Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb). Using antibacterials to inhibit specific cellular processes, he is currently investigating how perturbations to one or more pathways contribute to Mtb cell death.

Dr. Smith’s talk title is to-come, however you can learn more about him and see a list of his publications here.

We are excited to announce that the Levy CIMAR’s own Alysse Wurcel, MD, MS, will present for our September 29^th Science Seminar, our first talk of the ’22-’23 season. Dr. Wurcel is an Attending Physician in Geographic Medicine and Infectious Diseases at Tufts Medical Center whose research focuses on disparities and equity in healthcare. She is primarily interested in the prevention and treatment of infectious diseases in people who use drugs and people who are incarcerated. Her talk is titled, “Antimicrobial Stewardship in Jails and Prisons: When Will Then be Now?”

Dr. Wurcel has written on many topics including racial disparities in the prescribing of antibiotics. Looking at inpatient data for one study, she and collaborators found that Black inpatients were less likely to receive cefazolin and more likely to receive clindamycin compared with White inpatients. Cefazolin is one of the first-line skin and soft tissue infection  treatments. Clindamycin is not recommended given frequent dosing and high potential for adverse effects including Clostridioides difficile infection. (Source)

You can learn more about Dr. Wurcel here.

We are excited to announce that Harvard Medical School’s Christoph M. Ernst, PhD, will present for our May 26^th Levy CIMAR Science Lunch. Dr. Ernst is a postdoctoral research fellow in bacterial pathogenesis, genomics, epidemiology and chemical biology in the laboratory of Professor Deborah T. Hung, MD, PhD. His talk is titled, “Adaptive evolution of virulence and persistence in carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniaeinfections.”

Dr. Ernst studies the impact of adaptive mutations that are selected in bacterial infections to identify clinically relevant mechanisms of antibiotic treatment failure and bacterial pathogenesis and develop new antimicrobial strategies. His work has revealed global adaptive evolution of virulence and persistence in carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae infections and an intrinsic ability of K. pneumoniae to persist in an antibiotic-tolerant state in bladder epithelial cells. He has recently targeted intracellular K. pneumoniae in a chemical screen that led to the discovery of a host-targeting compound that induces broad spectrum intracellular antimicrobial activity and displays efficacy in mouse models of urinary tract infection. In his prior work, Dr. Ernst’s studies on the adaptive evolution of daptomycin resistance in Staphylococcus aureus infections led to the discovery of a major family of bacterial phospholipid flippases and to the development of flippase inhibiting monoclonal antibodies that sensitize S. aureus to host defenses. You can learn more about his work and publications here.

Please join us for this month’s Levy CIMAR Science Lunch, presented by Brown University’s Peter Belenky, PhD, an Assistant Professor of Molecular Microbiology and Immunology whose work focuses on the responses of microbial communities and isolated microbes to external stress such as antimicrobial agents. Dr. Belenky’s talk is titled, “Host and Microbial Metabolism as Determinants of Antibiotic-induced Disruption in the Microbiome.”

The Belenky Lab’s research is particularly pressing because unlike at any other time in human history, we are currently exposed to a wide array of natural and artificial antimicrobial agents in the form of antibiotics, chemical disinfectants, chemotherapeutic agents and other stressors. Understanding how these extracellular stressors affect our microbiome will provide critical biological insight into the development of dysbiosis, disease, and antibiotic resistance. Relying on recent advances in high-throughput DNA and RNA sequencing the lab looks at the effects of antimicrobial agents on these highly complex microbial communities to identify microbial mechanisms that lead to improved antimicrobial tolerance and the development of resistance. Learn more about the Belenky Lab’s work here.

The Levy CIMAR proudly welcomes the Mayo Clinic’s Robin Patel, MD, to present for our March ’22 monthly Science Lunch. Among her many titles at Mayo, Dr. Patel is an Elizabeth P. and Robert E. Allen Professor of Individualized Medicine, a Professor of Microbiology, and the Director of the Infectious Diseases Research Laboratory. In the research laboratory, she and her colleagues focus on biofilms, which cause a large number of infections in modern clinical practice, such as prosthetic joint infection and endocarditis.

Dr. Patel and her team are unraveling the process of biofilm formation and resistance of biofilms to antibiotics. They are developing new and improved diagnostic tools and treatment strategies for biofilm-associated infections. Her group uses in vitro studies as well as animal models of infection for their studies.

Dr. Patel is also co-Director of the Bacteriology Laboratory. There, she and her colleagues aim to offer state-of-the-art assays for clinical detection of bacteria, identification of bacteria, and characterization of antimicrobial resistance and susceptibility. In the laboratory itself, they develop many of the bacteriology assays offered for patient care at the Mayo Clinic, providing the most technologically and clinically relevant diagnostics possible.

We are excited to introduce our newest affiliate member, Lund University’s Anders P. Håkansson, PhD, who will present on January 27th for our first Levy CIMAR Science Lunch of 2022! His talk is titled, “How HAMLET, a Human Milk Protein, Kills Bacteria and Reverses Antibiotic Resistance.”

Dr. Håkansson is a Professor of Infection Medicine at Lund University in Malmo, Sweden. His laboratory focuses on understanding host-pathogen interactions, with emphasis on respiratory pathogens, using this knowledge to develop novel preventive and therapeutic strategies to protect against bacterial infection. The team’s work focuses on both the factors used by bacteria to establish colonization and cause disease and how this is counteracted by the host inflammatory response to colonization and infection. They are working on several major research projects, including the study of the direct bactericidal activity of a human milk protein-lipid complex against various bacterial species as well as its adjuvant activity in sensitizing bacteria to a broad range of common antibiotics to provide novel therapeutic strategies against respiratory and other infections with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.