Gastrointestinal Microbiota: From metagenomic correlation to causative validation and bacteriotherapy design, 22 Feb

12-1pm, Wednesday 22 February, Seminar Room 1, TRF

Presented by Dr Samuel Forster, Research Fellow, Pathogens Group, Wellcome Trust Sanger Centre, Cambridge UK
NHMRC C.J. Martin Fellow, Centre for Innate Immunity and Infectious Disease, Hudson Institute of Medical Research

Sam's work combines microbiology, immunology and computational analysis to understand the functional role and community dynamics of the human microbiota in health and disease.
Understanding how our microbiota is acquired and the forces that cause it to change provides important insights into health and disease. Sam's research seeks to understand the relationship between host state, microbiota community and the susceptibility to diseases including infections by opportunistic pathogens such
as Clostridium difficile and Inflammatory Bowel Disease.

His research is focused on:
 Wide scale 16S profiling and metagenomic sequence based analysis to understand microbiota community structure
 Computational modeling and machine learning based approaches to understand microbiota community dynamics in health and dysbiotic disease
 Analysis of the diversity of host cellular and transcriptional responses using in-vitro and in-vivo models of human microbiota communities

This work ultimately seeks to provide novel bacteriotherapies and identify other therapeutic interventions to improve human health.