Joel Abraham
$270,000
Blazanin, Michael
Unknown
Biology Postdoctoral Research
This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2025. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to biology in innovative ways. This research will improve our understanding of how pathogens evolve. More clearly than ever following the COVID-19 pandemic, pathogens can evolve extremely rapidly with global impacts. One of the most important ways that pathogens evolve is in their virulence, the harm they inflict upon their hosts. Understanding and predicting how pathogen virulence will evolve is paramount for fields from vaccine design to epidemiology, agriculture, and healthcare. The evolution of virulence can be shaped by numerous factors, but one of the most important factors that every pathogen interacts with is the host’s immune system. This project will test how immunity influences pathogen evolution, using experimental and simulation methodologies to build a predictive understanding of how pathogen virulence is shaped by the host immune system. The results of this research have broad implications, including for public health. This fellowship will also support mentorship, training, and education for undergraduate and graduate students. To test how immunity influences pathogen evolution, this project will use mathematical models and laboratory experiments. It aims to answer two questions: 1) how do different parts of the immune system individually shape pathogen virulence evolution, and 2) how does variation in immunity between hosts in a population shape pathogen virulence evolution. To answer these questions, this project leverages an extremely powerful laboratory model system: Caenorhabditis elegans nematodes. These nematodes are easy to experiment with, and their innate immune system shares many similarities with mammals. In this research, C. elegans will be experimentally infected with a widespread bacterial pathogen, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to directly observe how Pseudomonas evolves depending on the immune state of C. elegans. Experimental measurements will be integrated with mathematical models to directly test how well model predictions match experimental outcomes. Through the course of this fellowship training, the fellow will develop expertise with C. elegans-bacteria systems, build essential bioinformatic skills, and gain experience with evolutionary modeling. The broader impacts of this project include potential applications in public health policy and vaccine design, mentorship and hands-on research training for undergraduate students, development of a peer mentorship program for graduate students, and instructional modules that integrate research into undergraduate education. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.