Sam Forster

Understanding how our microbiota is acquired and the forces that cause it to change provides important insights into health and disease. Sam's research seeks to understand the relationship between host state, microbiota community and the susceptibility to diseases including infections by opportunistic pathogens such as Clostridium difficile and Inflammatory Bowel Disease. 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 16S profiling and 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