Current Clinical Microbiology Reports - Meet the Editors

Bridget Barker

Editor-in-Chief and Section Editor: Medical Mycology

Dr. Barker has extensive experience with genomics, bioinformatics, population and molecular genetics, and evolutionary biology. Her background in microbiology, work with fungal pathogens, and computational biology allowed her to develop and bring these new techniques to the field of Valley Fever research. As a director of the Animal Biosafety Laboratory (ABSL3) at NAU, Dr. Barker is developing cutting-edge methods for characterizing the in vivo fungal transcriptomes of Coccidioides immitis and C. posadasii. A better understanding of the transcriptional network in a murine model of coccidioidomycosis will provide new insight into interactions between fungus and host. She has been funded by an NIH-R21 award for an investigation of the as yet undescribed sexual life cycle of Coccidioides posadasii and C. immitis. Dr. Barker is also working on developing rapid environmental testing systems to determine potential times and regions for highest exposure potential. Finally, she is looking at the genetics of the fungus itself to determine if there are genomic characteristics of Coccidioides that make it more or less harmful to humans, or reveal clues regarding ecological distribution and potential for expansion of the endemic range.

Jason Sahl

Section Editor: Bacterial Genomics

Dr. Sahl’s primary research focus is infectious disease genomics, with an emphasis on functional and translational bioinformatics. Dr. Sahl has helped develop open-source bioinformatics pipelines that aid in the analysis and comparison of bacterial and fungal genomes. Recently, Dr. Sahl has focused on amplicon sequencing and bait-capture enrichment systems to genotype pathogens direct from specimen or sample with an emphasis on difficult or impossible to culture species. Dr. Sahl is applying these lab and bioinformatics tools to the development of better diagnostics and therapeutics in order to improve the surveillance and treatment of infectious diseases.

Sho Iketani

Section Editor: COVID-19, Immune Evasion and Therapies

Sho hails from Japan, but grew up in sunny California. Sho received his BA from Cornell University in 2015 and his MSc from ETH Zurich in 2016. Sho continued his virology training at Columbia University for his PhD, which he conducted in David Ho's laboratory, initially working on HIV-1 and then shifting to SARS-CoV-2 following the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sho defended his PhD in 2022 and has continued working in the laboratory as a postdoc. Sho’s recent work has primarily been on antibodies and protease inhibitors against SARS-CoV-2.

Rebecca Hall

Section Editor: Fungal Pathogenesis

Rebecca is interested in understanding how microbes adapt to their environment. After completing her Ph.D. thesis on understanding how the nematode C. elegans adapts to environmental pH, Rebecca became a fungal biologist and has contributed to our understanding of how human pathogenic fungi respond to carbon dioxide, a key host environmental signal that triggers fungal pathogenesis, and how the fungal cell wall is synthesized. Rebecca started her independent research career through the award of an MRC career development fellowship and is currently a Senior Lecturer in Microbial Adaptation at the University of Kent. Rebecca’s research group focus on understanding how adaption of fungi to their environment affects the synthesis of the fungal cell wall, and the implications this has on the host-pathogen interaction. Rebecca’s group are also interested in interkingdom interactions and their role in antimicrobial resistance in biofilms, germination of the Mucorales the causative agents of mucormycosis, and the development and identification of novel antifungals. 

Artur Yakimovich

Section Editor: Machine Learning in Infectious Diseases

  

Artur Yakimovich obtained his PhD from the University of Zurich, where he trained in two PhD programs simultaneously: Molecular Life Science and Interdisciplinary PhD program. During that time Artur worked on developing novel machine learning (ML) and computational modeling approaches to understand the biological mechanisms of virus spread between cells. Then, after a short postdoc at the Zurich University Hospital, Artur Yakimovich joined the MRC Laboratory for Molecular Cell Biology at the University College London, where he worked on Deep Learning (DL) approaches to analyzing host-pathogen interactions in microscopy images. Next, Dr Yakimovich joined Roche as a Data Scientist, where he worked on the application of DL to biomedical image analysis and literature search. Currently, Artur Yakimovich is a group leader at the Center for Advanced Systems Understanding at the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf. His group is working on ML algorithms for Infection and Disease.

Rhitoban Ray Choudhury

Section Editor: Microbe-Microbiome Interactions

I am an evolutionary geneticist and work on the genetics and genomics of arthropod symbiosis. My research covers many areas in biology, with particular emphasis on microbiomes. I did my bachelors and masters in zoology and completed my PhD from the University of Rochester, New York. After a post-doc from Purdue University, I joined the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali, as a faculty member in the biology department.

Shokoofeh Shamsi

Section Editor: Parasitology

Prof. Shokoofeh Shamsi holds a master’s degree in medical sciences and a PhD in Veterinary sciences, which explains her passion in research into transmissible diseases between animals and humans, and food safety. She has an international profile, including being a Senior Editor of Parasitology Research (a Q1 journal published by SpringerNature), Executive member of the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (AAA), and Director, Food Safety Information Council. Prof. Shamsi currently leads the Parasitology teaching and research team at the School of Agricultural, Environmental and Veterinary Sciences and leads the Parasitology research/teaching team at CSU.

Tetsushi Yoshikawa

Section Editor: Pediatric Viral Infections

I am a Professor and Chair of the Department of Pediatrics at Fujita Health University. In addition, I am also serving as Vice President of Fujita Health University and Deputy Director of the University Hospital. My research is focused on clinical virological studies of herpesvirus infections, particularly human herpesvirus-6 (HHV-6) and varicella zoster virus (VZV), and rotavirus.

Meaghan Hancock

Section Editor: Viral Latency

Meaghan Hancock conducted her Ph.D. research in the laboratory of Dr. Jim Smiley at the University of Alberta, where she studied the roles of herpes simplex virus proteins VP16 and ICP0 in overcoming innate barriers to viral gene expression. Her post-doctoral training was in the laboratory of Dr. Jay Nelson at the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute (VGTI), Oregon Health and Science University, studying the roles of human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) miRNAs in modulating host cellular signaling pathways. She is currently an Assistant Professor at the VGTI where she studies the molecular mechanisms of viral miRNAs and other viral gene products during HCMV latency in hematopoietic progenitor cells using primary and human embryonic stem cells. In addition, she is using cellular miRNAs to alter CMV tropism in order to better understand the immune responses elicited by CMV-based vaccine vectors.

Indranil Banerjee

Section Editor: Virology

I am an Assistant Professor at the Department of Biological Sciences, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali (IISER Mohali) since 2017. I completed my Ph.D. at the Swiss federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) in 2011, and carried out my postdoctoral research as a Novartis Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research, Basel (FMI Basel) and the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research (NIBR) until 2017. Our lab in IISER Mohali is interested in studying the cell biology of virus infection. Our lab is specifically interested in deciphering the complex interactions between medically-important viruses (influenza A virus, SARS-CoV-2 and dengue) and their respective host cells. Elucidating previously unknown virus-host cell interactions, we seek to advance our understanding of viral infection mechanisms, and illuminate potentially valuable targets to develop novel antiviral therapeutics.