University Bioconnect: SynthBiome founder Marvin Whiteley at BioSpark Labs

On March 26th, check out BioSpark Labs in Science Square and hear from SynthBiome founder Marvin Whiteley. BioSpark Labs has kindly offered their space, food, and drinks for the event (!), and we are invited to tour their freshly renovated labs and facilities as well.

Dr. Whiteley will be sharing his experience founding SynthBiome to provide a pre-clinical testing platform for antimicrobial pharmaceuticals. Marvin Whiteley is Professor of Biological Sciences, Co-Director of Emory-Children’s Cystic Fibrosis Center (CF@LANTA), Director of MicrobeATL, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. He received a BS in Zoology from the University of Texas at Austin, a PhD from the University of Iowa, and did a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford University. Dr. Whiteley was a Professor of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin where he was the founding Director of the Lamontagne Center for Infections Disease before coming to Georgia Tech where he founded the Center for Microbial Dynamics and Infection. His lab focuses on microbial pathogenesis and antimicrobial resistance to answer questions such as: “what is driving antibiotic tolerance in human chronic infections”, “why are infections that contain multiple microbes harder to treat”, and “why are the pre-clinical models used by pharma to identify antibiotics not yielding new drugs that work in humans?”. This last question has driven the founding of SynthBiome, whose goal is to accelerate discovery and deployment of new antimicrobials using a novel quantitative framework to develop robust and accurate preclinical models.

5:30pm-6:00pm: Networking and hanging out

6:00pm-6:30pm: Marvin’s story and Q/A

6:30pm-7:30pm: Networking and hanging out