University of California, Irvine
Project Title: Connecting the Spatiotemporal Organization of Gut Bacterial Communities to the Emergence and Spread of Antibiotic Resistance
Award Year: 2021
Biography
Dr. Travis Wiles' research program aims to piece together a multi-scale view of how host–microbe systems form and function. This goal was inspired by his past work in the fields of bacterial pathogenesis and microbiome research, in which he studied the highly contextual and dualistic (i.e., beneficial vs. antagonistic) nature of host–microbe relationships. During Dr. Wiles' doctoral work at the University of Utah he combined classic cellular microbiology approaches and a novel animal model to dissect the virulence mechanisms of extraintestinal pathogenic E. coli. For his postdoctoral work at the University of Oregon he used live imaging and synthetic biology to uncover factors that shape the ecology and biogeography of gut bacterial populations. Now, in Dr. Wiles' laboratory at the University of California, Irvine, he is innovating new experimental schemes to define the mechanisms that drive microbial life cycles and understand how the ecology of microbiomes fuels the emergence and spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria.