As a pediatric physician-scientist with multi-disciplinary training in infectious diseases, microbiology, immunology, and skeletal cell biology, my long-term objective is to lead a discovery-based team focused on understanding how infectious diseases and inflammation alter bone homeostasis, and conversely, how signals that control bone homeostasis impact antibacterial immunity. To this end, my research program has largely focused on the important clinical problem of osteomyelitis, one of the most common invasive bacterial infections in children and a paradigm for treatment-recalcitrant infectious disease. Over the last 19 years, I have studied the human pathogen Staphylococcus aureus, which is by far the most common cause of musculoskeletal infection. After completing clinical training in Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Diseases, I started my own research program focused on host-pathogen interactions during osteomyelitis, as well as the study of how infection and inflammation perturb skeletal cell biology. We have established several lines of scientific inquiry, including investigation of how both commensal and pathogenic microbes alter bone homeostasis, elucidating how pattern recognition receptor signaling impacts osteoclast and osteoblast differentiation and function, determining how cytokine and lymphocyte alterations in IBD impact bone health, and defining the metabolic and virulence programs necessary to sustain invasive staphylococcal disease. Emerging studies in our laboratory also focus on understanding the mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial tolerance during invasive infection.
Specialty : Pediatric ID
Full Member