Sam Forster

Sam leads the Microbiota and Systems Biology Laboratory at the Hudson Institute of Medical Research. His team's work combines microbiology, immunology and computational analysis to understand the functional role and community dynamics of the human microbiota in health and disease.

Understanding how our microbiota is acquired and the forces that cause it to change provides important insights into why we get sick and how to maintain health. Sam’s research seeks to understand the relationship between our immune system, the microbiota community and susceptibility to diseases. His research is focused on:

• Analysis of the diversity of host cellular and transcriptional responses using in-vitro and in-vivo models of human microbiota communities
• Wide scale metagenomic sequence based analysis to understand microbiota community structure
• Computational modeling and machine learning based approaches to understand microbiota community dynamics in health and dysbiotic disease

This work ultimately seeks to provide novel bacteriotherapies and identify other therapeutic interventions to improve human health