Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri
Project Title: Mining the Phage Playbook to Create a Potent, Generic Phage Therapy
Award Year: 2023
Biography
Dr. Michele LeRoux performed her doctoral research at the University of Washington in Seattle, where she studied antagonistic interactions between bacteria. During her postdoctoral training at MIT, she investigated the biological function and molecular mechanisms of bacterial toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems and discovered that a key function of TA systems is to defend bacteria against their viruses, phages. She established her independent research group in 2022 at Washington University in St Louis, where her group investigates bacterial interactions with phages in a variety of opportunistic pathogens with the goal of deciphering the molecular determinants for phage host range.