BME Seminar
Friday, February 14th, 2020
UTEB 150 at Storrs & Videoconferenced to UCHC CG-079B
12:00-1:00 pm
“Engineering Interventions to Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infection”
Presented By: Bryan Bryson, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Member of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University.
Abstract: Tuberculosis is the leading cause of infectious death in the world with over a million deaths per year. It remains incompletely understood how to redirect immune function for Mtb clearance. While there are incredibly promising vaccine candidates for tuberculosis, several key questions remain in understanding the pathogenesis of Mtb infection from the perspective of innate immunity. Our lab has developed a suite of experimental and computational approaches to understanding innate immune responses to Mtb with single-cell precision. Using these tools, we have been able to characterize and monitor the earliest events in response to Mtb infection revealing that at early time points that the bacterium is a weak inducer of inflammatory immune responses. In parallel efforts, we have been inspired by the idea of “creative reuse” of publicly available data to advance new interventions for Mtb survival and have used these data to identify new candidate antibiotics for Mtb.
Biography: Dr. Bryan Bryson is an Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusettes Institute of Technology, and Harvard University. Bryan obtained his undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Biological Engineering. He then pursued postdoctoral training at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. For fun, Bryan makes homemade ice cream and runs marathons to cancel out his ice cream consumption.
For more information, contact: Wendy Vanden Berg-Foels at wendyv@engr.uconn.edu