microTalk

Dr. Damian Krysan is a physician and an Associate Professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Dr. Krysan studies fungi, which in addition to their known roles in e.g. food spoilage and alcohol fermentation, can cause significant disease in humans. Fungi typically cause serious and potentially fatal disease in immunocompromised people, which presents a challenge to the medical communit...

Dr. David Bisaro is a Professor at the Ohio State University. Dr. Bisaro studies plant viruses, which are a major source of economic loss for farmers. Plants, just like humans, can be infected with viruses, but unlike humans they don't have antibodies and immune cells to fight off virus infections. This can be devastating for farmers who can lose large amounts of their crops from plant viruses. Dr...

Dr. Alex Berezow is a science reporter, he works with the American Council on Science and Health to report on scientific discoveries and current issues. He discusses some of the difficulties associated with reporting on science to an increasingly skeptical and/or distrusting general public. In the era of fake news, conspiracy theories, and the internet, it has become increasingly difficult for sci...

Whooping cough, caused by the bacterium Bordetella pertussis, is an extremely dangerous and potentially fatal disease for infants. We rarely see this disease anymore because everyone is routinely vaccinated against it with the DPT childhood vaccine. But there has lately been a resurgence in whooping cough cases, caused primarily by a reformulation of the vaccine to make it safer, which unfortunate...

Dr. Stefan Pukatzki is a Professor of Immunology and Microbiology at the University of Colorado in Denver. Dr. Pukatzki studies Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes the human disease cholera. Cholera is a dangerous water-borne disease that rapidly spreads through human populations in large epidemics. Dr. Pukatzki discovered that V. cholerae has a stabbing device, the Type Six Secretion syste...

Mr. Cliff Kapono is a PhD student at the University of California San Diego. The human body is covered with trillions of microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa), and these microbes produce lots of different chemicals that affect humans in many different ways. Kapono's thesis studies are based on the idea that surfers spend a lot of time in the ocean, so their microbiomes are likely inf...

Dr. Nathan Schmidt is an Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of Louisville. Dr. Schmidt studies the parasite that is transmitted by mosquitoes and causes malaria, Plasmodium. Malaria is a prevalent parasitic disease around the globe that is estimated to kill up to 500,000 people every year. Dr. Schmidt is interested in how the microbiome, which are the bacteria tha...

Dr. Girish Kirimanjeswara is an Assistant Professor of Immunology and Infectious Diseases at Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Kirimanjeswara studies bacteria that cause disease in humans, and how the immune system fights against these microbes. Selenium is a trace element that is found naturally in various environments, and Dr. Kirimanjeswara has become interested in the involvement of selenium...

Dr. Jeffrey Stott is a Professor of Microbiology and Immunology at the University of California, Davis. Dr. Stott studies the cause of an unusual tick-borne disease localized in cattle in California. Epizootic Bovine Abortion is caused by bacteria that cannot be grown in the laboratory, which has hampered the development of vaccines against this disease that leads to up to 5-10% of all cattle abor...

Dr. Mike Gilmore is the Sir William Osler Professor of Ophthalmology, and Microbiology and Immunobiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Gilmore is the director of the Harvard-wide Program on Antibiotic Resistance, and his research focuses on the evolution and development of multidrug resistant strains of enterococci, staphylococci, and streptococci. The world is facing a serious health crisis with...

Dr. Timothy Kern is a professor in the Department of Pharmacology at Case Western Reserve University and director of the Center for Diabetes Research. His research is focused primarily on determining what causes retinopathy in diabetes patients and how to prevent it. His laboratory is identifying how hyperglycemia causes retinopathy, and discovering new treatments that may inhibit the loss of visi...

Mr. Jason Rosenfeld, assistant director of global health at University of Texas Heath Science Center at San Antonio is the first speaker of Microtalk. He is a public health professional with over 10 years of experience designing, implementing and evaluating international health and development programs, with a specific focus on community based water, sanitation and hygiene education and behavior c...