Profile

The global respiratory gram-positive bacteria, Streptococcus pneumonia colonizes the nasopharynx of healthy children and adults. Despite being a natural colonizer, pneumococci are also major causative of life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia, septicemia and meningitis worldwide and are classified as priority pathogen by the WHO since 2017. The focus of my laboratory is to study the molecular pathogenesis of pneumococcal infections and investigate the mechanisms underlying pneumococcal interaction with the host immune cells and immunoevasion. Our pathogen of interest is S. pneumoniae and we use primary human cells as well as in vivo mouse models.