Current Lab Members
Lucius Chiaravilgio, MS
Research Associate III
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Mr. Chiaraviglio received his B.S. from Harvard University and M.S. from the University of Chicago. He has worked previously as a systems engineer, programming project consultant, and software test engineer for companies such as Miranova, Laserlith, and Ziatech/Intel, and was a Principal Investigator for National Science Foundation and California SBIR grants. He has worked in the Kirby Laboratory since 2003 on high throughput antimicrobial discovery and Bartonella pathogenesis. Outside of the laboratory, Lucius is an active member of the Boston Street Railway Association, an organization devoted to public transportation in New England. He has done heroic service helping the molecular microbiology laboratory during evening and night shifts during covid surges.
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Yoon-Suk Kang, MS, PhD
Post Doctoral Fellow
Dr. Kang received his Ph.D. from Korea University studying bacterial hydrocarbon degradation by several model organisms in the laboratory of Professor Professor Woojun Park. He then performed postdoctoral work on the genetic regulation of microbial arsenic metabolism in the laboratory of Professor Timothy R. McDermott at Montana State University. He joined the Kirby Laboratory anti-microbial discovery effort in March 2013.
Thea Brennan-Krohn, MD
Postdoctoral Fellow,
Thea joined joined the laboratory in January 2016 to explore synergy combinatorial therapy for CRE and other multi-drug resistant Gram negative organisms. Prior to joining the laboratory, she received her MD degree from Stanford Medical School, performed a residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital Boston, and completed a clinical intensive year of a Pediatric Infectious Diseases Fellowship also at Children's Hospital. She recently completed a CPEP Clinical Microbiology Fellow at BIDMC, a program which integrates training in clinical microbiology and clinical microbiology-related research.
Yanqin Huang, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Yanqin joined the laboratory In January 2022 after after perfecting analysis in two compartment models in the Laboratory of Zachary Bulman at the University of Illinois. In previous ventures, she was instrumental in the development of the MRX-1, a new oxazalidinone antibiotic and brings antimicrobial development experience from both academic and industry.
Kate Zulauf, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
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Kate joined the laboratory in February 2018 after finishing her PhD work studying the pathogenesis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis in Miriam Bronstein's laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, During her postdoctoral work in the Kirby lab she identified small molecules that evict drug resistance plasmids and restore susceptibility in carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae and elucidated several fascinating mechanisms of action. This also led to an exciting collaboration with the Roman Manetsch's medicinal chemistry group. Kate transitioned to the world of biotechnology and later stage therapeutic development with her move to Locus Biosciences in the Research Triangle Park in the Spring of 2021, still maintaining important focus on the drug resistant prokaryotes..
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Divya Vijayakumar
Undergraduate
Divya is a senior at Northeastern University who joined the laboratory in March 2018 to study antimicrobial resistance and apramycin. She is currently busy cloning and studying novel resistance mechanisms after completing a Northeast University Co-op at a local CRISPR biotechnology company.
Alex Green
Medical Student
Lab Member Emeritus
Alex took a research year away from medical studies at the Wayne State University School of Medicine to explore translational and basic antimicrobial resistance experiments. He has studied antimicrobial resistance in Syrian refugee camps in Jordan and in the Eastern Mediterranean as a Boren Fellow. He worked on rapid AST methods, aminoglycoside resistance, and antibiotic efflux in the lab.. He recently transitioned to lab emeritus status while finishing out medical school. He recently started his pediatrics residency/infectious disease fellowship combo at Yale-New Haven Hospital starting in July 2021. Rumor has it that he may not have completely left the Kirby laboratory, hence, emeritus status.
Shade Rodriguez
Research Associate
Shade joined the lab after graduating as a biochemistry major from the University of Arizona where she conducted research on the effect of environmental chemicals on the reproductive system and further work in a reproductive biology laboratory She worked with Thea to work on antimicrobial synergy and other projects and in July 2021 entered the Graduate Program in Pathobiology at Brown University.
Kat Truelson
Research Associate
Kat joined the lab as an undergraduate at Boston University. She is interested in antimicrobial resistance and potential graduate school a few years in the future. She joined the laboratory in March 2016 and performed projects on antimicrobial synergy and became an expert at antimicrobial time-kill studies. In January 2018 she joined the W. M. Keck Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics Facility in the Josephine Bay Paul Center at the Woodshole Marine Biological Laboratory as a research assistant in the laboratories of Hilary Morrison and Mitch Sogin where she was busy sequencing the genomes of archaea from deep see volcanoes! In the summer of 2018, she moved to Chicago to join Howard Shuman's laboratory to study Legionella and Acinetobacter as a prelude to graduate school studies in the biomedical sciences. Kat rejoined the laboratory in August 2020 as a research associate! Welcome back.
Bella Stewart
Undergraduate
Bella joined the laboratory in the spring of 2021. She is a junior at Wellesley College and is studying drug efflux and more recently cloning resistance genes and is now a full time member of the laboratory during the spring 2022 semester. She is our resident expert in 3-D printing.
Maisha Foyez
Undergraduate
Maisha is a sophomore at Northeastern University who is diving into molecular biology to study an array of novel antimicrobial resistance elements.
Former Lab Members
K.P. Smith, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
KP joined the laboratory in July 2015 after completing his PhD thesis in Microbiology and Molecular Genetics at the University of Vermont in the laboratory of Keith Mintz. For the past few years he has been studying Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans, a noted cause of juvenile periodontitis, aggressive periodontal disease, and "HACEK" group endocarditis, taking a proteomics approach to investigate cell membrane physiology. He previously received a master degree for his studies on multi-drug efflux pump-mediated antimicrobial resistance in Vibrio cholera and Staphylococcus aureus. KP studied a lot of things in the lab including high throughput screening approaches to identify small molecule inhibitors of CRE; the inoculum effect, the use of artificial intelligence to interpret Gram stains, the development of the MAST platform for rapid AST, and various aspects of COVID-19 diagnostic testing. He joins Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania as Assistant Director of Infectious Disease Diagnostics and the University of Pennsylvania Pereleman School of Medicine as an Assistant Professor of Pathology on August 2020.
Matthew Ware
Research Assistant
Matt is our resident mechanical engineer and is working on development of the MAST platform and Technologist Assist. At Cedarville University, he was part of the Formula and Supermileage SAE Design Teams and later worked as a medical systems architect and engineer. He completed a Post-Baccalaureate Premed Certificate Program at Tufts University prior to joining the lab. His ultimate goal is to become a physician-scientist. He began Tufts Medical School in fall 2019.
Thao Truong
PhD Student (Translational Clinical Microbiology Rotation)
Thao is completing her PhD in Tom Berhardt's laboratory at Harvard Medical School. She is currently performing a three month rotation to work on the MAST platform and gain experience in the clinical microbiology lab before applying to and embarking on medical microbiology CPEP fellowship training. Rumor has it that as an undergraduate she studied a ribosome-acting natural product with antimicrobial activity. Update: Thao began CPEP Medical Microbiology Fellowship at UCLA Children's Hospital July 1, 2020
Liam Friar
Post-Graduate
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Liam graduated from Colgate University with a degree in physics. In the lab, he is working on in vitro pharmacokinetic/pharmcodynamic modeling of antimicrobial combinations. He continues the laboratory tradition of extremely gifted and dedicated snowboarders (initiated by Kat Truelson). Liam will be starting graduate school at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Environmental Sciences in the fall.
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Sarah Ditelberg
Undergraduate
Sarah is now a junior at U. Mass Amherst and joined the lab as a freshman for the summer and school breaks to study antimicrobial synergy against prokaryotic and eukaryotic life forms. .She spent the previous summer and first semester of junior year full time in the lab. This summer she is working in our close associate, Dr. Stefan Riedel's laboratory, studying COVID-19 serological response
Jennifer Tsang, PhD
Dr. Tsang received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia studying Helicobacter pylori flagella biogenesis and gene regulation in the laboratory of Professor Timothy Hoover. Did we mention that Helicobacter is a type IV secretion system-dependent pathogen? During the long drive from Georgia to Boston, she learned that she had two Journal of Bacteriology papers accepted on the same day as a culmination to her PhD work! She joined the Kirby laboratory in April 2015 to identify novel antimicrobials targeting Carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae.
She is currently a scientific content editor at JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experimentation) and actively engaged as a scientific writer on many fronts including the ASM Blog and her own blog, The Microbial Menagerie. Also see her blog, scientific writing, and photography at http://jwtsang.com/. They are awesome.
She is currently a scientific content editor at JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experimentation) and actively engaged as a scientific writer on many fronts including the ASM Blog and her own blog, The Microbial Menagerie. Also see her blog, scientific writing, and photography at http://jwtsang.com/. They are awesome.
Sylvine Raverdy, MS, PhD
Sylvine joined the Kirby Laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow after completing a PhD in parasitology/neglected tropical diseases at the New England Biolabs and the University Louis Pasteur (Strasbourg I). She is currently a Senior Scientist at Becton Dickinson.
Scott Duong, MD
Scott joined the laboratory as a postdoctoral fellow after completing a Clinical Pathology Residency at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He later performed a Medical Microbiology Fellowship at BIDMC. He is currently the Associate Director of Clinical Microbiology at North Shore-LIJ Medical Center and an Assistant Professor of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the Hofstra North Shore-LIJ School of Medicine. Reportedly he has his hands full with microbiology diagnostic clinical trial work.
Calvin Williams, MD
Calvin joined the laboratory as part of the Harvard Medical School Scholars in Medicine Program devoting a "fifth" year in his HMS medical school training to antimicrobial research. He completed a rotating internship at the University of Chicago and is now in a Dermatology Residency Program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
Dawn Nekorchuk
Dawn joined the laboratory as a Research Assistant after graduating with a Bachelors of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is currently completing her PhD in Medical Geography at the University of Florida.
Ryan Brennick,
Student
Ryan is an undergraduate at Northeast University. He joined the Kirby laboratory in the spring of 2015 to study multi-drug resistance in Gram negative bacteria and develop novel susceptibility testing methodology. We will definitely be taking advantage of his skills using Mathematica. His photograph was taken during his first experiment in the laboratory!