Expertise
Manipulating microbial communities and their byproducts is a rich and tractable opportunity for therapeutics. Dr. Needham first became interested in bacterial-host interactions as a graduate researcher studying the evolutionary strategies employed by bacterial pathogens to subvert mammalian immune detection. This work led her to appreciate the extreme range of potential host outcomes upon subtle structural variation of bacterial small molecules. As a postdoctoral researcher, Dr. Needham shifted her study of bacterial byproducts into commensal gut microbial molecules that influence neurodevelopment. The laboratory gained insight on the complexities of the molecular signatures that an altered gut microbiota imparts on its host. Her current work focuses on moving beyond associations of phenotypes in the gut and brain and into concrete causal effects that can be leveraged to understand host phenotypes.
