Christina Cuomo

Christina Cuomo, Ph.D.

Christina Cuomo

Christina Cuomo is the director of the Fungal Genomics Group and associate director in the Genomic Center for Infectious Diseases at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Her group uses genomic methods to characterize the evolution of fungal pathogens. Studying species across the fungal kingdom, her work has led to major insights into the unique features of pathogenic species, how genomes evolve, variation with pathogen populations, antifungal drug resistance, and genes involved in host interaction. Her work is highly collaborative, engaging a global network of teams of computational biologists, experimental scientists, clinicians, and field researchers.

Cuomo led projects for the first representative genomes of critical fungal species, including animal pathogens, plant pathogens, and model systems. Her group’s current focus is genomic analysis of major human fungal pathogens, with the overarching goal of better understanding the genetic basis of pathogenicity and drug resistance. These studies include the application of genomic and transcriptomic approaches to study the emerging drug-resistant species Candida auris, the Cryptococcus species complex, and species of dimorphic fungi.

Cuomo received her A.B. in biology from Bryn Mawr College and Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University. She joined the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research, now part of the Broad Institute, in 2002 and now works in the Broad’s Infectious Disease and Microbiome Program. She is a fellow in the CIFAR Fungal Kingdom Program and in the American Academy of Microbiology and serves as editor-in-chief at the ASM journal Microbiology Spectrum.

Contact Christina Cuomo via email at cuomo@broadinstitute.org.

January 2023