Friday Conference: Outbreak of Mycobacterium Abscessus in Transplant Patients Traced to Environmental Sources and Globally Disseminated Clone

Dr. Qingyun Liu was trained in both computational biology and experimental microbiology and leads a multidisciplinary research program that integrates large-scale bacterial population genomics with high-throughput experimental approaches to investigate the evolutionary mechanisms underlying tuberculosis (TB) transmissibility and drug resistance, as well as the emergence of nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) pathogens. Dr. Liu’s work has revealed how Mycobacterium tuberculosis evolves mechanisms that accelerate drug resistance within hosts and has identified bacterial pathways linked to highly transmissible strains. His group also develops high-throughput bacterial phenotyping tools to systematically connect bacterial genotypes with functional phenotypes. Dr. Liu has authored more than 50 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Science, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Cell Host & Microbe, Science Advances, and Nature Communications.