Assistant Professor, Microbial Infection and Immunity
686 Biomedical Research Tower (BRT)
460 W 12th Ave, Columbus OH 43210
Skye.Fishbein@osumc.edu
Education and training
- BS/MS from Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
- PhD from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, Boston, MA
- Postdoctoral Fellow, WUSM, St. Louis, MO
- Graduate student (Thesis), Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
- Fulbright Fellow, Stellenbosch University
Research interests
Clostridioides difficile infection (CDI), a bacterial infectious disease the gut microbiome, causes an estimated half a million infections annually and imparts a significant financial burden on the healthcare system. Our lab focuses on the microbial ecology within the host gastrointestinal tract and how community function impacts a patient’s infection outcomes.
We aim to disentangle the microbial ecology of CDI by (1) systematically defining commensal bacterial functions that antagonize C. difficile pathogenesis, (2) characterizing the scope of genetic variation across diverse C. difficile lineages that alter its colonization or pathogenesis, and (3) developing new computational and experimental approaches to query microbial community physiology in vitro and in vivo.
The lab employs a combination of phylogenomics and bacterial genetics to resolve the strain-specificity of bacterial functions and utilizes gnotobiotic and conventional animal models of infection to examine microbial determinants of disease. With the advent of defined microbial therapeutics, it is our goal to increase the precision of these therapeutics and antibiotic stewardship towards mitigating infectious diseases of the gut microbiome.