Areas of Interest:
Tuberculosis remains a threat to global health, killing ~2 million people every year. The causative agent of tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is thought to infect one-third of the world's population, sickening ~10 million people a year. Despite efforts to simplify treatment strategies, tuberculosis still requires months of multi-drug therapy to cure. Our research focuses on designing optimized therapies for TB using cell biology and engineering approaches. Our lab is a multidisciplinary research team, integrating quantitative measurement with computational modeling and analysis to create intuitive descriptions of complex cell biology. We focus our studies on (1) characterizing single-cell determinants of mycobacterial drug tolerance, (2) understanding how growth heterogeneity is controlled, and (3) engineering combination therapy.