Biochemist Brian Coombes has been awarded a second Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Infectious Disease Pathogenesis to investigate how major enteric pathogens — the organisms that enter our bodies and cause serious problems with our gastrointestinal systems — infect humans, and how human and environmental activities influence the evolution of these infectious diseases.

I am deeply honored to have been recognized with the title of University Scholar. This couldn’t have happened without the amazing work of the many talented graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates who I have had the privilege of working with over the past 10 years.

The lab is proud to announce that MSc student Elizabeth Chau has received the 2016/2017 Ontario Graduate Scholarship for her ongoing work on regulatory evolution in bacterial pathogens.

The newest member of the Coombes lab team has won a Canada Graduate Scholarship from NSERC. Caressa Tsai joined the Coombes lab in 2016 from the University of Toronto, where she used bioinformatics and quantitative trait models to study molecular evolution.