Julia Oh

The long-term goal of our research program is to create new microbiome-based therapeutics for skin disease, with implications for a wide range of inflammatory diseases. My lab is a hybrid of computational microbiomics and experimental microbiology, and our laboratory goals reflects this dual expertise. We develop advanced algorithms and analyses using shotgun metagenomic sequencing data for the purpose of reconstructing the structure and dynamics of microbial communities, and we complement our genomic predictions with in vitro and in vivo experiments to investigate gene function, visualize microbes, or test mechanism of action. Much of our work is focused on the human skin microbiome, and we have also diversified to gut and airway microbiota to better understand systemic and local interactions of the microbiome with the immune system.

Our lab’s basic framework is to use our computational approaches to create highly informative maps of the fundamental characteristics of healthy vs. diseased microbiomes, to use microbial cultivation and cutting-edge organoid models to test our genomics-driven hypotheses and to define a phenotype for individual microbes, then finally, to identify and create strategies to engineer the microbiome for therapeutic purposes.