Multispecies Biofilms: Technologically Advanced Methods to Study Microbial Communities

Author Biography

Karishma S. Kaushik is a physician, scientist, and clinical microbiologist, with education and training that has spanned 15 years and two continents. After completing her medical degree and residency at the Armed Forces Medical College, Pune, India, she moved to the US to pursue a PhD in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Texas at Austin. She returned to India in 2018, on the Ramalingaswami Re-entry Fellowship from the Government of India, that supports the return and research of early-career scientists to the country. She has started her independent research group at the University of Pune, and her research group studies complex infection states, notably in the context of biofilm infections, under human-relevant conditions. Her team is looking to gain comprehensive insights into infection microenvironments, towards developing precision-based, composite and non-conventional antimicrobial therapeutics approaches.  Originally from the UK, Sophie E. Darch  completed her BSc in biomedical sciences at Lancaster University, followed by an MSc in medical microbiology at The Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. During her PhD she started to focus on bacterial diversity and communication in the cystic fibrosis lung at the University of Nottingham. After graduation she relocated to the United States and became a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin, followed by the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her love for biofilms continued throughout her postdoc, and since January 2019, she has been an Assistant Professor in the Morsani College of Medicine at the University of South Florida. Now in her own lab, she uses methodologies to observe and analyze bacterial aggregates in real-time, in three-dimensions and at the micro-scale.