Current Lab Members
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 developing new models for studying type IV secretion system dependent pathogenesis in Brucella and Legionella, identify small molecule inhibitors of intracellular bacterial growth and technology for assessing antimicrobial activity.
Yanqin Huang, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Yanqin joined the laboratory In January 2022 after after perfecting analysis in two compartment models in the Laboratory of Zachery P. Bulman at the University of Illinois. In previous ventures, she was instrumental in the development of the MRX-1, also known as Contezalid, a new oxazalidinone antibiotic with reduced bone marrow toxicity compared to other approved oxazalidinone antibiotics such as linezolid, and brings antimicrobial development experience from both academic and industry, including significant experience with two-compartment hollow fiber PK/PDmodels.
Ariane Paz y Mino, MD
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Ariane will be working part time in the lab during her medicine residency performing research on antimicrobial resistance. Ariane completed her medical degree at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Ecuador. She is currently pursuing her Internal Medicine residency at MGB Salem Hospital and will be applying to Infectious Diseases fellowship next year. Ariane has actively contributed to research studies related to mechanisms of antibiotic resistance in Latin America. Her focused interest lies particularly in ESBL and carbapenem resistance. Looking forward, Ariane sees herself diving into a career that blends infectious diseases and microbiology.
Alhanouf Aljahdali, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow
Alhanouf is a medicinal chemist by training who completed her PhD in the laboratory of our close collaborator, George O'Doherty, at Northeastern University. In the Kirby lab, she will be pursuing projects related to antimicrobial development and characterization under a prestigious KAUST fellowship. She joined the laboratory in September 2022 and has been leading the charge in molecular modeling using the Schrodinger Maestro Suite and natural product analog synthesis as well as biological characterization of her medicinal chemistry handiwork.
Ibidunni Bode-Sojobi, M.B.B.S.
Ibidunni is a current Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She had her medical education from the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Nigeria and postgraduate training in Medical Microbiology at Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Nigeria where she later practiced and carried out research on Mycobacterium tuberculosis and antimicrobial resistance in Enterobacterales. During her time in the lab, she will be expanding on her work on Mycobacterium species and antimicrobial resistance.
Lucius Chiaravilgio, MS
Research Associate III
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.
Andrea Kirmaier, PhD
Andrea joined the lab to study evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in chronically Infected immunocompromised patients. Impressively, SAR-CoV-2 can replicate in patients at high levels for years. What mysteries will be revealed! Andrea was formerly a research assistant professor at Boston College studying retroviral interlopers within herpes virus that infected deep sea turtles amongst other more run of the mill retroviruses. During the COVID pandemic, she set up and led the Boston College SARS-CoV-2 molecular diagnostic laboratory testing a staggering 6000 patients a week, before beginning a combined CPEP/postdoctoral fellowship in translational infectious diagnostics at BIDMC. She has an unanticipated fondness for streptococci that infect tilipia fish and their contribution to human infections. At left, she is posing in front of the lab's MiSeq with which she is still on speaking terms.
Heidi Alhannat
Heidi joins us in the summer of 2024. A rising Harvard College sophomore Heidi will be growing Streptomyces to induce them to produce copious quantities of antimicrobials amongst other biological feats in the laboratory! Outside of the laboratory Heidi loves to sing, play clarinet, and cook.
Well Jedi, CLH
Well Jedi joined the lab in May 2023 with an interest in setting up high throughput assays related to antimicrobial resistance and antimicrobial development. By report Well is tireless and can fill microplates in any variety and in any pattern. of columns. When combining Well's efforts with the TECAN D300 inkjet printer the Sky really is the limit. To make sure Well's ambition does not get ahead of Well's physical capacities -- knowing that as a good lab citizen with an overabundance of Integraty Well will work day and night to help other lab members -- we will be sure that Well gets an annual checkup and with our generous fringe benefit plan we expect no issues with liquidity. Welcome Well. Updated: we are very excited to try on your 16-channel manifold just released in 2024 to expedite our efforts even further. Thank you for being a work horse!
Nithya Sastry
Nithya is a Northeastern University undergraduate joinied the laboratory in spring 2022 to study efflux pump activity and just completed a 6 month Northeastern Co-op experience in the lab. She is continuing her molecular biology adventures as time permits now that she is back in school full time and intends to apply to graduate school at the culmination of her undergraduate career.
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
Jessica Ross, PhD
former Postdoctoral Fellow
Jessica auspiciously joined the Lab in June 2022 immediately after the ASM Microbe meeting. She recently completing her doctoral work on antimicrobial peptide biocin rationale design targeting prokaryotic and parasitic pathogens in the laboratory of Shaun Lee at the University of Notre Dame. Of note, Jessica is an American Society of Microbiology Young Ambassador establishing collaborations around the globe to address emerging antimicrobial resistance and previously helped set up clinical microbiology laboratory capacity in Ecuador. In the lab, she investigated tyhe biology of plasmid therapeutics in collaboration with the Manestsch laboratory and novel gram-negative resistance mechanisms.
Thea Brennan-Krohn
former 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. In 2022, Thea joined the BIDMC Pathology Department as an independent research faculty member. We are delighted that Thea's new laboratory space is immediately next to the Kirby Laboratory as this will facilitate numerous collaborations going forward, and of course we now have our combined weekly lab group meetings.
Kat Truelson
former 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! She is in graduate school in the Microbiology Department of Boston College in August 2022. We know she will be a frequent visitor with an awesome manuscript in progress.
K.P. Smith, PhD
former 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. After leaving the lab, he joined the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania as Assistant Director of Infectious Disease Diagnostics and is currently also an Assistant Professor of Pathology at the University of Pennsylvania Pereleman School of Medicine.
Kate Zulauf, PhD
former Postdoctoral Fellow
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..
Alex Green, MD
former Medical Student Researcher
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 is now completing a pediatrics residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and in July 2024 will begin a pediatric infectious disease fellowship at the Children's Hospital of Pennsylvania (aka CHOP) where KP is a faculty member. We look forward to reading about his future discoveries as a physician-scientist with research efforts in topics of mutual interest.
Bella Stewart
former Undergraduate Researcher
Bella joined the laboratory in the spring of 2021 as an undergraduate at Wellesley College. She spent her spring 2022 semester in the lab where she was our resident expert in 3-D printing. leaving us with a beautifully rendered bacteriophage of which we are very fond. She also became acquainted with Mycobacterium abscessus under Yanqin's guidance. Since leaving the lab, she has pursued burgeoning research interests in the Laboratory of Atomistic and Molecular Modeling (LAMM) at MIT, publishing a thesis titled: "Enhanced Osseointegration of Metal Oxide Implants: A Computational Study,” joined David Kaplin's laboratory at Tufts University to study silk-based biomedical implants, and will be embarking on a PhD program at MIT in 2024 in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering merging computational and structural engineering disciplines to study tissue and bone regeneration technology.
Divya Vijayakumar
former Undergraduate Researcher
Divya studied apramycin and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, and novel resistance mechanisms in the lab, while a Northeastern University undergraduate beginning in 2018. She currently works for L.E.K. consulting.
Shade Rodriguez
former 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.
Matthew Ware
former 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. Updates: Thao completed her CPEP Medical Microbiology Fellowship at UCLA Children's Hospital July 1, 2022, and is now a faculty member at University of Washington School of Medicine and Harbor View Hospital in Seattle.
Liam Friar
former Post-Undergraduate Reseacher
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). He went directly from the lab into graduate school Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Sarah Ditelberg
Undergraduate
Sarah spent time in the lab during summers, school breaks, and first semester junior year while an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with studies largely focused on antimicrobial synergy against prokaryotic and eukaryotic life forms. .She also helped with our study of the limit of detection of SARS-CoV-2 antigen assays examining the performance of these assays in Stefan Riedel's laboratory (Associate Clinical Microbiology Director at BIDMC. In 2022, she matriculated in the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine.
Jennifer Tsang, PhD
former Postdoctoral Fellow
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 was previously scientific content editor at JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experimentation), currently a science writer for Millipore Sigma and otherwise 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 was previously scientific content editor at JoVE (the Journal of Visualized Experimentation), currently a science writer for Millipore Sigma and otherwise 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, a Dermatology Residency Program at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and is now a practicing dermatologist in Bedford, TX.
Dawn Nekorchuk
Dawn joined the laboratory as a Research Assistant after graduating with a Bachelors of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Since leaving the laboratory, she obtained her PhD degree in Medical Geography at the University of Florida, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability at the University of Oklahoma.
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!