Lilly Immergluck
Morehouse School of Medicine, GA·Public Health & Epidemiology
Staphylococcus aureus is a common bacterium: it lives harmlessly on the skin and in the noses of a quarter to 40 percent of people, yet it is also the leading cause of skin and soft tissue infections treated outside the hospital. Since the late 1990s a new strain lineage has driven community infections on an epidemic scale, hitting African American and Indigenous children and older adults especially hard.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Microbiology & Immunology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
Staphylococcus aureus
antibiotic resistance
multidrug resistance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Apply association mining to antibiotic resistance phenotypes of community-onset Staphylococcus aureus from children to identify which resistance patterns co-occur and how multidrug-resistant profiles have changed over two decades.
- Use spatial trend analysis and multilevel, spatially relevant group-based trajectory modeling to detect subtle shifts in multidrug resistance over time and delineate the geographic areas tied to specific resistance patterns.
- Characterize the genotypes and associated resistance phenotypes of community strains causing skin and soft tissue infections, and identify factors contributing to repeat infections in the same children.
- Identify S. aureus antigenic determinants, bacterial surface features recognized by the immune system, that could serve as candidate staphylococcal vaccine targets.
More about the research
Over time these bacteria have added resistance to more antibiotic classes, making S. aureus one of the top drug-resistant threats worldwide. This project asks where and when multidrug-resistant forms are spreading in communities, and which place-based conditions put children at risk.
Why it matters
Mapping how neighborhood conditions shape risk of drug-resistant skin and soft tissue infections could guide prevention efforts where they are most needed, and help explain why African American and Black children are disproportionately infected with MRSA. Identifying strain features and recurrence risk factors may inform community transmission control and the selection of possible vaccine targets.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Thomas Matula
University of Washington, WA·Biomedical Engineering
Expand an animal model of skin and soft tissue abscesses to include MRSA, a drug-resistant bacterium, for testing focused ultrasound treatment.
Robert Clubb
University of California-Los Angeles, CA·Biochemistry
Determine how the C. diphtheriae surface receptor HbpA captures human hemoglobin, and test whether it works with other heme-binding receptors to distort hemoglobin and trigger heme release.
Juliane Bubeck Wardenburg
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology
Determine how S. aureus alpha-toxin (Hla) impairs antigen-specific CD4+ T cells in skin infection, examining antigen trafficking, T-cell receptor signaling during infection, and whether T-cell ADAM10 levels predict susceptibility, using cell-type-specific transgenic mice and a human biorepository.
The school
Morehouse School of Medicine: 3 labs on PI Pages, $69M a year on research, 7 research doctorates a year.
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