Faculty
ITiMS students were asked to identify two faculty mentors — one with laboratory expertise, and one with expertise in either mathematical modeling or population approaches. They would serve as co-mentor of the student and ensure that the student completed all required ITiMS trainings in laboratory, modeling, and population sciences.
An ITiMS training program will include:
Didactic and practical training in population and laboratory approaches.
Instruction in relevant statistics and/or bioinformatics analytic techniques.
Instruction in mathematical modeling.
Using basic ecological principles, we study populations of microbes and their dynamics in humans or the environment. Through this study, we determine how different populations combine and interact to form microbial communities — these communities are defined as the species present, and their relative abundance. There are also populations of human hosts or environmental patches, and we use Epidemiology and Ecology to determine how these populations and environments function to control the exchange of microbes in migration and infection. Only by integrating population studies of both microbes and their hosts or environments are we able to ask and answer questions about how microbes interact with each other — and how they function and evolve in their hosts or environments.
Laboratory Sciences
We are broadly defining laboratory sciences as studies relying on laboratory experiments to characterize biological specimens and their dynamics. These include traditional laboratory methods for identifying species and characterizing the physiology of an organism, and molecular biologic techniques (the ’omics) that may be applied to clinical or population samples, or samples from animal or in vitro experimental models. Our mentors include faculty using animal and in vitro models of microbial communities, e.g., experimental biofilm systems and animal models, and faculty who are characterizing specimens using genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics.