Female researcher working in lab

Personalized Health at the Molecular Level

Exploring drug synthesis, delivery and diagnostics, minimizing antibiotic bacterial resistance, and understanding the role molecules play in our health.

We explore treatments, diagnostics, and pathways towards affecting personalized health on a molecular and individual level. Molecular details help us understand how chronic and infectious diseases work, and broaden our approach to medicine by exploring drug synthesis, delivery, and diagnostics. We're exposed to diverse molecules through our food, water, and even our environment. These interactions range from atoms to complex bacterial communities and, while critical to our survival, they can be detrimental. We combine bioinformatics, chemical synthesis, molecular characterization, and imaging to understand the role molecules play in our health.

The widespread use of antibiotics is driving a worldwide increase in the prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria. According to the World Health Organization, this problem is so serious that it “threatens the achievements of modern medicine.”

Our faculty is uniquely positioned to reduce this growing global health problem with advanced diagnostics to detect and differentiate pathogens, the use of novel approaches for point-of-care devices, research into evolution-based approaches, and therapies that include a mixture of fundamental microbiology, biochemistry, and molecular modeling.

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