CGE People

Lee Harrison, MD

Director

Dr. Harrison is the Associate Chief of Epidemiology and education, Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology, Head of the Infectious Diseases Epidemiology Research Unit and, Chair of the Allegheny County Board of Health. Dr. Harrison is the Director of the Center for Genomic Epidemiology “CGE.”

Faculty Profile

James Bina, PhD

The Bina lab studies mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance and bacterial pathogenesis in the gram-negative pathogens Vibrio cholerae and Klebsiella pneumoniae. The long-term goal of our studies is to define the underlying processes that allow bacteria use to cause disease and resist antibiotics.

Profile

Jieshi Chen

Ms. Jieshi Chen is a senior research analyst in the Auton Lab at the Robotics Institute,  Carnegie Mellon University. She is specialized in applying machine learning techniques to detect and characterize anomalous patterns in massive scale temporal transactional data in healthcare informatics, financial industry and other domains.

Profile

Vaughn S. Cooper, PhD

The mission of the Cooper laboratory is to translate evolutionary biology to improve human health, empower K-12 education, and reveal the origins of biodiversity. Specifically, we study the evolution, ecology, and genome dynamics of experimental and clinical microbial populations.

Profile

Yohei Doi, MD, PhD

Dr. Doi is the Director of Center for Innovative Antimicrobial Therapy at the University of Pittsburgh. The mission of Dr. Doi’s laboratory is to identify and investigate antimicrobial resistance of clinical concern among gram-negative bacterial pathogens. The areas of research include the genetic and molecular basis of emerging antimicrobial resistance mechanisms; the rapid diagnosis of resistance using phenotypic, genetic, and lipidomic approaches; and inhibitor-based drug discovery. Current efforts are focused on colistin resistance in Acinetobacter baumannii, a problematic healthcare-associated pathogen, and fosfomycin resistance in Escherichia coli, the predominant cause of urinary tract infection in both healthcare and community settings. The latter work has expanded into drug discovery effort aimed at reversing resistance using an inhibitor-based approach.

Faculty Profile

Artur Dubrawski, PhD

Artur Dubrawski is a Research Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute where he directs the Auton Lab, a research group of 80+ focusing on fundamental and applied research on machine learning. Dr. Dubrawski has three decades of R&D experience; he has served in executive roles in high tech industry and as a principal investigator on several projects into artificial intelligence for a range of government industrial partners.

Faculty Profile

Elise Martin, MD, MS

As the Medical Director of Infection Prevention and Hospital Epidemiology at VAPHS, Dr. Martin is most interested in quality improvement research in infection prevention and finding ways to decrease the spread of hospital acquired pathogens and resistant organisms. She is very interested in how we use personal protective equipment and isolation to decrease the spread of infections, while trying to maintain high quality patient care. Most of her research focuses on contact precautions and hospital adverse events. She is also interested in infection prevention in dialysis, CLABSI, and medical education.

Faculty Profile

Barbara Methé, PhD

Dr. Methé is the Director for the Center for Medicine and the Microbiome and a Visiting Professor of Medicine. Dr. Methé has extensive experience in genomics, metagenomics, microbial ecology and physiology and handling large data sets from high throughput functional ‘omics-enabled methodologies. She has led numerous annotation and comparative genome analyses of diverse prokaryotes and has developed and applied multi-omics approaches to the study of microbial communities from diverse environments including freshwater, deep subsea floor and groundwater systems, to plants, animals and humans. She was one of the leaders of the NIH supported Human Microbiome Project (HMP), a multi-organization effort focused on systems biology approaches to study microbes of the adult human body and has continued to study the human microbiome in a variety of contexts including psoriasis and lung disease.

Faculty Profile
Center for Medicine and the Microbiome

James Kyle Miller

Kyle Miller is a senior project scientist in the Auton Lab at the Robotics Institute,  Carnegie Mellon University. He is an expert in applying mathematical modeling and machine learning to applications in human health, nuclear safety, and predictive maintenance.

Profile

Alison Morris, MD, MS

Dr. Morris is the Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy, and the UPMC Chair in Translational Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine. She established the University of Pittsburgh HIV Lung Research Center as well as the Center for Microbiome and Medicine.

Faculty Profile

Tung Phan, MD, PhD, D(ABMM)

Dr. Phan is an American Board of Medical Microbiology-certified medical microbiologist with comprehensive experience in virology and molecular diagnostics. His research is focused on novel virus discovery using unbiased next-generation sequencing methods, genetic characterization of known and novel viruses, molecular epidemiology and evolution, and development of molecular diagnostic assays for known and novel viruses.

Faculty Profile

Lora Pless, PhD

Dr. Pless is the Director of the Microbial Genomic Epidemiology Laboratory (MiGEL). MiGEL uses whole genome sequencing in combination with epidemiology to track transmission of important human pathogens and assist Infection Prevention at the University Of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC).

Faculty Profile

Mark Roberts, MD, MPP

Dr. Roberts is Professor and Chair of Health Policy Management, and Director of Public Health Dynamics Lab.

Profile

Melissa Saul, MS

Melissa Saul is a clinical data scientist in the Department of Medicine with expertise in clinical data extraction from electronic health records. Ms. Saul has developed a variety of software tools to improve the accuracy of data queries and retrievals and develop the data validation schemes needed to support clinical and translational research projects in infectious diseases as she has collaborated with this group for over twenty years.

Profile

Graham Snyder, MD, SM

Graham Snyder is Medical Director of Infection Prevention and Hospital Epidemiology for UPMC Presbyterian and the UPMC system. The infection prevention teams at UPMC form a critical partnership with the Center for Genomic Epidemiology by contributing the “applied” environment to identify and investigate pathogen transmission and deploy solutions to prevent infections.

Faculty Profile

Media Relations

Alexander Sundermann, DrPH

Mr. Sundermann focuses on the epidemiology and transmission of hospital acquired pathogens.

Harrison Lab

Daria Van Tyne, PhD

The Van Tyne Lab studies how bacteria evolve during human infection to resist antibiotics and the host immune system, using comparative genomics and functional analysis.

Van Tyne Lab

Kady Waggle, BS

Ms. Waggle manages the Microbial Genomics Epidemiology Laboratory (MiGEL) at the University of Pittsburgh. She is an expert in genomics and microbiology with a research interest in hospital acquired transmission of human pathogens.

Harrison Lab

Division of Infectious Diseases
Academic Administrative Office

818 Scaife Hall
3550 Terrace Street
Pittsburgh, PA 15261
Academic Office: 412-383-9062

For Patients: 412-647-7228

Center for Care of Infectious Diseases

Falk Medical Building
3601 Fifth Avenue, 7th Floor
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Patient Appointments: 412-647-7228

Main CCID Fax: 412-647-7951