Rick Bushman, PhD

Dr. Bushman's research focuses on host-microbe interactions in health and disease. His groups' main research areas are 1 ) global studies of the human microbiome and 2) studies of HIV pathogenesis. In recent years, his work has been increasingly driven by the new deep sequencing methods. For microbiome studies, this allows comprehensive analysis of microbial populations without reliance on culture-based methods, which can detect only a small fraction of all organisms present. He as been carrying out these type of studies since 2002, and over the years has built up software pipelines that allow efficient analysis of deep sequencing data. He studies the role of the gut microbiome in the interindividual variability of drug responses.