[bioundgrd] FW: Join the MIT Microbiome Club! General Body Meeting TOMORROW @ 6PM in 32-124

[Joshua Stone]

From: Chelsea Catania <cataniac at mit.edu>
Reply-To: microbiome-exec <microbiome-exec at mit.edu>
Subject: Join the MIT Microbiome Club! General Body Meeting TOMORROW @ 6PM in 32-124

MIT Microbiome Club
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General Body Meeting 2019

Tuesday, September 10 from 6 - 7 pm in MIT 32-124 (map<https://whereis.mit.edu/?go=32>).

Food will be served.

Learn more about the General Body Meeting<https://www.facebook.com/events/2401554546837868/?active_tab=about> or the Club<https://www.facebook.com/MITmicrobiomeclub/> on our Facebook page or RSVP here<https://www.eventbrite.com/e/mit-microbiome-club-general-body-meeting-prof-travis-gibson-tickets-71419873765>

Join us for our first meeting of the year! The first half of the meeting will be dedicated to discussing our club, talking about what we accomplished last year, and how you can get involved this year. We’re looking for many new people to join us and help plan our amazing events!


During the second half of the meeting, Prof. Travis Gibson, a faculty member at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, will give a talk on "Learning microbial dynamics for therapeutic applications: Scalable inference and robustness.”


Abstract: Microbes are everywhere, including in and on our bodies, and have been shown to play key roles in a variety of prevalent human diseases. Consequently, there has been intense interest in the design of bacteriotherapies or "bugs as drugs," which are communities of bacteria administered to patients for specific therapeutic applications. Central to the design of such therapeutics is an understanding of the causal microbial interaction network and the population dynamics of the organisms. Toward that direction I will present recent work on a Bayesian nonparametric model and associated efficient inference algorithm that addresses the key conceptual and practical challenges of learning microbial dynamics from time series microbe abundance data (Ref 1). These challenges include high-dimensional (300+ strains of bacteria in the gut) but temporally sparse and non-uniformly sampled data; high measurement noise; and, nonlinear and physically non-negative dynamics. In a related work I will discuss a simpler inference problem surrounding the engineering of an interdependent consortia of bacteria (Ref 2). Here we will focus on experimental design for inference and discuss best practices for designing synthetic bacterial consortia for clinical/pharmaceutical applications.
Bio: Travis recently joined the faculty of Harvard Medical School in the Department of Pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Division of Computational Pathology). He did post-doctoral training in statistical inference and experimental biology with Dr. Georg Gerber and in the area of microbial dynamics/networks with Dr. Yang-Yu Liu. His PhD was in Control Theory with a minor in Mathematics (Analysis) from MIT. Outside of academic research Travis has worked for NASA, Boeing, and Johnson and Johnson. Travis’ algorithms are currently flying on several Boeing air vehicles.
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The MIT Microbiome Club, part of the Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, brings together inquisitive MIT undergrads, grad researchers, postdocs, faculty, and clinicians in the emerging field of microbiome studies and microbiome-based medicine. Learn more on our Facebook page. <https://www.facebook.com/MITmicrobiomeclub/> Or follow us on Twitter<https://twitter.com/MITubiomeclub>.

Chelsea Catania, Ph.D.
MIT Microbiome Club Board Member
Postdoctoral Associate
Laboratory for Energy and Microsystems Innovation
Department of Mechanical Engineering
@MITubiomeclub<https://twitter.com/MITubiomeclub>



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