Prof. Vanessa Sperandio University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Vanessa Sperandio is the Chair of the Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology in the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Robert Turell Professor. She was the Jane and Bud Smith Distinguished Chair in Medicine, and a Professor in the departments of Microbiology and Biochemistry at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She... read moregot her bachelors in biology, and her masters and PhD in Molecular Genetics in the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil. She was a Latin American Pew Fellow in Biomedical Sciences (1997), an Ellison Foundation New Scholar (2004), a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Investigator in the Pathogenesis of Infectious Diseases (2006), and a National Academy Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow (since 2007). She is the recipient of the ASM 2015 Eli Lilly and Company-Elanco Research award, and a winner of the 2014 GSK Discovery Fast-track challenge. In 2013 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (AAM) and is the Chair of the Board of Governors of the AAM. She was elected as an American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) fellow in 2022. Her research investigates chemical, stress and nutritional signaling at the interface amongst the mammalian host, beneficial microbiota and invading bacterial pathogens. The main tenant of research in her laboratory is the study of how bacterial cells sense several mammalian neurotransmitters leading to rewiring and reprogramming of bacterial transcription towards host and niche adaptation. She has also identified several bacterial receptors to mammalian neurotransmitters and reported that invading pathogens hijack these inter-kingdom signaling systems to promote virulence expression. She also translated these basic science concepts into strategies to develop novel approaches to anti-microbial therapy.