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Protecting Our Region's Poultry with Advanced Technology
Mostafa Ghanem is using new genomic tools to improve our understanding and the prevention of infectious poultry diseases.
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Meet Ryan Blaustein, an assistant professor of nutrition and food science who joined UMD in 2022. His research focuses on microbial ecology of food systems, with the goal of developing biologically inspired strategies to enhance food safety and environmental sustainability. Through mentorship in his lab and teaching courses such as Food Microbiology (NFSC430/ NFSC679M) and R for Applied Genomics (NFSC679G), he engages students in these critical topics. As a member of the UMD Center of Excellence in Microbiome Sciences, he is interested in interdisciplinary collaboration and exploring the diverse microbial connections between environment, agriculture, and consumer health. Reach out to Ryan to connect and discuss joint interests. | |
Save the Date – Microbiome Symposium
When: Friday, March 21, 2025
Our second annual one-day symposium will take place at the University of Baltimore next year. We are looking for student, postdoc, and/or faculty volunteers to help with organizing the symposium. Please contact Gabi Steinbach or Mihai Pop to indicate interest or suggest a potential volunteer candidate in your group. More details coming soon.
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MicroSocial Seminar Series
The MicroSocial Seminar Series aims to facilitate scientific exchange and community building across the University of Maryland's microbiome research community. Seminars feature short talks by students and faculty, followed by 30 minutes of informal socializing over coffee and snacks.
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Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2024
Time: 4 p.m.
Location: ESJ 1224
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Speaker: Sydney Overton, Ph.D. student, electrical engineering
Talk: "Electrochemical Detection of Gastrointestinal Serotonin Toward Understanding the Gut Brain Axis"
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Speaker: Madhusudan Timilsina, Ph.D. student, veterinary medicine
Talk: "Exploration of the Upper Respiratory Tract Microbiome and Probiotic Interventions In Chickens"
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Invited Speaker Series
Talk: BLAST to the Future: A Story of Sequences in Biology
Speaker: David J. Lipman, senior science advisor for bioinformatics and genomics at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition
Date: Tuesday, November 26
Time: 4–5 p.m.
Location: ESJ 1224
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Relevant Webinar
Developing Human Infection Models in a Test Tube
Speaker: Marvin Whiteley, Professor of Biological Sciences, Georgia Tech
When: Thursday, November 21 at 10 a.m.
Location: Zoom
This talk is hosted by SYMCEL, a biotech company that promotes the calScreener technology, a label-free assay that directly monitors the metabolic response in biological systems using biocalorimetry. Register to learn more and get ideas for how to apply a calScreener in research. (NOTE: We have a calScreener on campus in case you get inspired to try it for your research. Contact Birthe Kiellerup for more information.)
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Conference
West Coast Bacterial Physiologists Annual Asilomar Meeting
When: December 13–15, 2024
Location: Pacific Grove, California
Abstract Deadline: November 20, 2024
Learn more about the conference including trainee financial support.
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NSF Funding
Building Synthetic Microbial Communities for Biology, Mitigating Climate Change, Sustainability and Biotechnology
Deadline: Monday, February 3, 2025
The National Science Foundation is accepting applications for projects that use a model synthetic microbial community to better understand the formation, maintenance, or functionality of natural communities and to understand a natural community’s impact on the host. It also seeks projects that create synthetic communities with novel capabilities and aim to understand the biological underpinnings for these capabilities. Learn more.
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Microorganism-Mediated Organismal Resilience to Climate Change
Deadline: Thursday, January 23, 2025
The National Science Foundation is seeking proposals of microorganism-mediated organismal resilience to climate change. The overarching goal is to leverage the power of microorganisms to develop practical solutions for mitigation and adaptation to climate change and build a resilient planet, leveraging systems-level approaches to query microorganism resilience and the dynamic dialogue across the host-microorganism continuum, which ultimately regulates microorganism-mediated resilience to environmental change across temporal (e.g., lifespan) and/or spatial (e.g., landscape) scales. Learn more and reach out to Mihai Pop if interested in a joint proposal.
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News of Interest
ASM Provides Bioeconomy Priorities to Sen. Gillibrand
What existing federal programs should be considered as part of a congressional bioeconomy agenda? What sectors and aspects of the bioeconomy need significant capital investment? Amalia Corby, the Director of Federal Affairs for the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) answers these questions and more in an open letter about congressional prioities to Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-NY). Read here.
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To have your research, events, or other resources included in the next newsletter, contact the center's program coordinator Gabi Steinbach at gabis@umd.edu. | | | | |
