September 20, 2021
Veterinary college to host Barbara Kazmierczak for seminar on infectious bacterium
The COBRE Center on Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases, or CEZID, is hosting Barbara Kazmierczak, Ph.D., M.D., in the CEZID Distinguished Speaker Seminar Series at 3 p.m. Friday, Sept. 24, via Zoom.
Kazmierczak's presentation for the seminar is "All for one, one for all — cooperative virulence in Pseudomonas aeruginosa."
Kazmierczak is a professor of microbial pathogenesis and director of the medical degree-Doctor of Philosophy program at Yale University. She received her doctorate from Rockefeller University in 1993 and her medical degree from Cornell University Medical College in 1994, both in New York City. She completed an internal medicine residency and infectious diseases fellowship training at the University of California, San Francisco, and joined the Yale faculty in 2001.
Kazmierczak's research program is broadly focused on bacterial and host factors that allow opportunistic infections to occur. Using pseudomonas aeruginosa as a clinically relevant model, her lab addresses fundamental questions of how cell-envelope spanning bacterial machines — the Type 3 secretion system, Type 4 pili and polar flagellum — are assembled, regulated and used during infection. She has also identified host responses directed at components of these virulence-associated structures, in particular those mediated by the NLRC4 inflammasome. Inflammatory responses to bacteria are also a focus of her work on microbiome-host interactions in infants with cystic fibrosis.
Kazmierczak was recognized as a Burroughs-Wellcome Fund investigator in the pathogenesis of infectious diseases in 2007, a Donaghue investigator in 2002 and a Hellman family fellow, also in 2002. She is a fellow of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Academy for Microbiology.
The CEZID seminar series is organized by the diagnostic medicine and pathobiology department in the College of Veterinary Medicine and is hosted by Juergen Richt and Phil Hardwidge.