Sushmita Patwardhan, PhD

Sushmita came to the Gibbons Lab as a microbial ecologist. For her PhD, she used culture-based as well as computational methods to investigate the microbial community composition and function at a shallow-water gas vent in the Tyrrhenian Sea, Italy. Her interests lay in understanding the interactions between microorganisms and their in situ environment and how one affects the other. While in the Gibbons lab, Sushmita continued to explore these interactions in the human gut environment. To that end, she investigated the ecological succession and function of microbial communities in the infant gut. This helped Sushmita gain a deeper insight into microbial community assembly in early life, which ultimately contributed towards developing methods to engineer the gut microbiome for a healthy life. Sushmita went on to take a position as a Medical Writer at Precisionscientia.