AMR Seminar: Zemer Gitai, Princeton University
Cornell Center for Antimicrobial Resistance Research & Education Fall Seminar Series 2024
“How can we find antibiotics with new mechanisms of action?”
The rise in resistance to known antibiotics has made developing new approaches to combatting bacterial pathogens increasingly urgent. I will discuss work from my lab that aims to address this unmet need by bringing quantitative and biophysical perspectives to the problem. For example, we have combined machine learning and morphometric studies to design screens for antibiotics with novel mechanisms of action. Meanwhile, novel methods for single-cell transcriptional analysis enable new insights into the heterogeneity of bacterial responses to antibiotics, which may in turn help improve their use in treating infections.
Zemer Gitai Bio:
Zemer Gitai is the Edwin Grant Conklin Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1996. After completing his graduate studies at UCSF in 2002, Dr. Gitai became a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Lucy Shapiro at Stanford University where he pioneered the study of the MreB actin-like cytoskeleton in Caulobacter crescentus. Dr. Gitai joined the faculty of Princeton University as an Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology in 2005. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2012 and to Professor in 2015. In 2016 he became the Edwin Grant Conklin Distinguished Professor of Biology. He was also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Molecular Biology from 2012-2018.
