People

Kate received her B.A. in biology from Tufts University, where she investigated tadpole social behavior with a computational video analysis pipeline. She now studies populations of Cryptococcus neoformans variants to identify genomic diversity and evolution associated with human virulence.

Jason received his B.S. in computer science from Columbia University, where he studied transposon-encoded CRISPR-Cas systems. Jason is a Broad Biomedical Post-Baccalaureate Scholar. He is characterizing fungal isolate variation in order to trace the relationship of isolates involved in outbreaks and to identify loci associated with antifungal drug resistance in Candida.

Poppy completed her Ph.D. at the University of Birmingham (UK), where she investigated host-pathogen interactions and germination in mucormycosis-causing species. She focuses on understanding how natural genetic variation in clinical populations of fungi impacts disease outcomes in immunocompromised individuals. To do this, she employs genome-wide association studies to see how genetic variation contributes to patient outcomes and anti-fungal resistance. She is also interested in applying deep learning to the development of new antifungals to combat emerging and resistant fungal pathogens.

Terry received his B.S in biochemistry from Bucknell University. He has been a major contributor to genome assembly projects for fungi, bacteria, and other species, and has led the development of new approaches for high-throughput, high-accuracy genome assembly. He has also helped evaluate data produced by new technologies, and helped optimize bioinformatic pipelines for genome assembly, metagenome assembly and annotation, and amplicon studies.

 

Hannah received her B.A. in biochemistry/statistical and data sciences from Smith College, where she conducted research in neglected tropical diseases and antibiotic resistance data trends. She is currently studying biostatistics as an M.S. student at Boston University. She focuses on population and genome-wide association studies intended to examine the basis of antifungal resistance in Aspergillus fumigatus, and to characterize intra-host variation observed in fungal infections.