Microbiology MS/PhD Program Faculty
Program Directors
Rajeev Misra is a microbial geneticist who studies how proteins, synthesized in the cytoplasm, are targeted to the bacterial outer membrane. He also examines the mechanisms of drug resistance.
Wang is an applied microbiologist, working at the interface between microbial genetics and metabolic engineering to develop new microbial production processes.
Microbiology (PhD)
The microbiology graduate program offers a dynamic research environment, broad range of basic, translational and use-...
Program Faculty
Abbaszadegan is a professor of environmental microbiology and engineering and founding director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Water & Environmental Technology (WET) Center at ASU.
Dr. Anderson is a tumor biologist who studies how the immune system can be harnessed to detect and alter cancer development.
Bean applies bioanalytical chemistry methods to characterize microbial metabolomes and identify biomarkers of lung disease.
Blattman is an immunologist who studies how the immune system responds to vaccination and viral infection.
Cadillo-Quiroz studies how microbes participate in ecosystem and applied processes.
Chang is an immunologist who studies the development and function of the immune system and uses DNA nanostructure to design and construct more useful vaccines and immunotherapeutic agents.
Garcia-Pichel is the Director of the Center for Applied and Fundamental Microbiomics. He studies the roles, adaptations and impacts of microbes in natural environments, from desert soils to shallow marine waters.
Gile is an evolutionary microbiologist who studies single-celled eukaryotes (protists) and symbiosis.
Haydel is an infectious disease microbiologist investigating new antibiotics to fight resistant infections, new technologies to diagnose infections in less than 2 hours, and how bacteria cause disease in humans.
Hogue is a virologist who studies how coronaviruses, a large family of RNA viruses, that includes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS), assemble and cause disease.
Ian Hogue is a virologist who studies how alpha herpesviruses, including human Herpes Simplex Virus 1 (HSV-1), infects the nervous system.
Silvie Huijben is an evolutionary biologist who studies the evolutionary ecology of resistant organisms. Her aim is to optimize treatment strategies that minimize resistance evolution, with a focus on malaria.
Jacobs is an expert on a poxvirus called vaccinia. He has genetically engineered vaccinia as a vehicle against infectious agents, bioterrorism threats, cancer and other viruses, including HIV.
A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Jacobs is the author of more than 50 publications on the physiological and molecular control of plant development, He is also the dean of Barrett Honors College at ASU.
Johnston work focuses on innovative solutions to fundamental problems in biomedicine, including the development of a universal preventative cancer vaccine. He holds 20 patents.
Krajmalnik-Brown's lab uses microbiological skills, genomic techniques and environmental engineering to study biodegradation of water contaminants, biotechnology for renewable bioenergy production and the gut microbiome.
Lake is a cellular and molecular immunologist who is working on biologic inhibitors of tumor cell metastasis. He is also developing a new test for Valley Fever that provides a diagnosis for patients with acute disease.
Mor is a molecular biologist and biochemist whose research focuses on using plants to produce useful and therapeutic polypeptides, proteins and enzymes.
Efrem Lim studies the role of the virome in human health and disease. His expertise is in the microbiome in mother-infant health and SARS-CoV-2.
Lynch's research focuses on mechanisms of evolution at the gene, genomic, cellular, and phenotypic levels, with special attention being given to the roles of mutation, random genetic drift, and recombination.
Hugh Mason was the first to publish peer-reviewed work on the use of plants for production of vaccine antigens.
McCutcheon studies endosymbioses, or relationships where one cell lives inside the other. He and his group mostly work bacterial infections that benefit—rather than harm—their hosts.
Grant McFadden directs the Biodesign Center for Immunotherapy, Vaccines, and Virotherapy (B-CIVV) at ASU. The McFadden lab studies how poxviruses that cause immunosuppression interact with the host immune system.
Rajeev Misra is a microbial geneticist who studies how proteins, synthesized in the cytoplasm, are targeted to the bacterial outer membrane. He also examines the mechanisms of drug resistance.
Neuer is a biological oceanographer and plankton ecologist and studies the oceanic carbon cycle, particularly the role of plankton organisms in uptake and sequestration of anthropogenic carbon dioxide.
Cheryl Nickerson studies the effects of biomechanical forces on living cells, how this response is related to normal cellular homeostasis or infectious disease, and its translation to clinical and biotechnology applications.
Rittmann is director of the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology. He is an international leader in the use of microbial communities to provide services to society.
Geiler-Samerotte is an assistant professor in the Center for Mechanisms of Evolution and School of Life Sciences. Her lab investigates how basic features of cells influence the way those cells can evolve.
Yixin Shi’s research is focused on molecular biology, bacteriology and biochemistry. Shi analyzes the virulent elements necessary for bacterial survival in host environments.
Shock has appointments in the School of Molecular Sciences and School of Earth and Space Exploration and is director of the W. M. Keck Foundation Laboratory for Environmental Biogeochemistry at ASU.
Shrivastava uses biology, physics, and bioinformatics to find factors that shape spatial structure of the microbiome. His lab aims to find how changes in the microbiome correlate with the occurrence of diseases.
Trembath-Reichert is a geobiologist studying microbial life in the deepest, darkest portions our planet to understand its limits, origins and extensibility beyond Earth.
Varsani is a molecular virologist who works across ecosystems from plants to animals and from the tropics to polar regions.
Vermaas and his team conduct basic and applied research on cyanobacteria, a group of photosynthetic microbes, using these organisms as a chassis to produce useful compounds (biofuels, green chemicals) from sunlight and CO2.
Wang is an applied microbiologist, working at the interface between microbial genetics and metabolic engineering to develop new microbial production processes.
Wideman strives to understand the emergence of complexity in eukaryote evolution. Using comparative genomics and cell biological approaches he reconstructs features of the last eukaryotic common ancestor.
Novel coronavirus information
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