People

Roby Bhattacharyya, MD PhD

Principal Investigator (2019 - )
As the PI of the Bhattacharyya lab (since 2019), Roby finds himself amazed at how abruptly he went from mainly doing science to mainly thinking, reading, and writing about science while trying to set up his lab members to succeed in actually doing it, and while he still enjoys the chance to wield a pipet here and there, lab members are increasingly surprised to see him doing so. He also attends on the inpatient Infectious Diseases consult service at Massachusetts General Hospital. Broadly, his goal for the lab is to create a friendly, happy, collaborative, and intellectually rigorous environment in which to study the responses of pathogens to antimicrobials, and of humans to infection, with the ultimate aim of improving the care of infected patients.
You can read more about our lab’s philosophy here, and the details of our research projects here or in the descriptions of each lab member below.
Email: rbhatt {at} broadinstitute {dot} org
Twitter: @roby_bhatt

Pierre Ankomah, MD PhD

Postdoctoral fellow (2020 - )
Pierre was born in Ghana, West Africa, and moved to the Amish wonderland of Lancaster, Pennsylvania for a liberal arts education at Franklin & Marshall College. Afterwards, he sought warmer pastures at Emory University in Atlanta, where he completed a physician-scientist training program with a research focus on within-host microbial population and evolutionary dynamics. He moved to Boston to keep his warm-cold-warm-cold transitions consistent, completing residency in Internal Medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital and subsequently joining the Mass General Brigham Infectious Diseases (ID) fellowship program.
Currently, in addition to being a clinical ID attending and junior mentored faculty at MGH, Pierre is also a research fellow in the Bhattacharyya lab (jointly with Nir Hacohen’s lab), where he is exploring the effects of host immune responses on infectious syndromes. His current project involves refining our understanding of immune cell signatures that are present at sepsis diagnosis and during the clinical course of the syndrome. To facilitate this, he is using single cell RNA-sequencing (scRNA-seq) to profile peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) obtained from a clinical cohort comprising patients with sepsis and others with sterile inflammation. By taking advantage of scRNA-seq’s ability to provide resolution that distinguishes between immune cell types and transcriptional subsets within a PBMC population, he is characterizing immune cell abundances and kinetics, including those of potential novel transcriptional states from these patient samples to gain a better understanding of sepsis immunopathogenesis.
Outside of the lab, Pierre lives and breathes soccer, and likes to say he is a professional soccer fan whose career has been blighted by occasional forays into science and medicine. You can reach him at pankomah {at} broadinstitute {dot} org if you have any questions, suggestions, etc.!

David Roach, MD

Postdoctoral fellow (2022 - )
David was born and raised in Washington State with some extensive time spent running feral in Montana when his parents needed a break. After going to college in Helena, MT, he went to medical school and did his residency at the University of Washington in Seattle. Afterwards, he spent two years working as an overnight intensive care physician during Covid and at this point in his life it's pretty tough to ruffle his feathers. He came to Boston to pursue his infectious disease fellowship and splits his time at MGH and Brigham and Women's Hospital doing clinical care. Interestingly, he was in the hospital in Seattle when the first Covid patient was admitted and in the hospital at MGH when the first monkeypox patient was admitted... there seems to be a pattern.

When not being a harbinger of pandemics, he enjoys doing research on antibiotic resistance and is hoping to develop a cost-effective approach to diagnosing highly resistant bacterial infections in low-income areas around the globe, with a focus on Latin America. His research is on *Klebsiella pneumoniae* and the SHERLOCK system, so if you have any tips or tricks on either of those please let him know.
If he is not working you can find him listening to country music, pining for Seattle, and cooking dinner for friends, come join!

Liz Arsenault Yee, PhD

Postdoctoral researcher (2023 - )
Liz is a coffee loving born and raised native of Massachusetts. She ventured a little further down the New England coast for college at the University of Connecticut earning her B.S. in Marine Sciences. During her junior year, she joined the phytoplankton ecology lab of Dr. Senjie Lin where she worked with *Alexandrium fundyense* (cause of Red Tide) and the effect of climate change on its survival. She loved the lab so much and was not super excited about hanging out on boats in the frigid Connecticut spring, that she continued to pursue research opportunities in the Biotech industry.
After graduating in 2016, to the delight of her parents, she moved home to start her first job at Roche Diagnostics as a Lab Manager and Junior Scientist in Early Research and Development on the cobas Liat team. After a year at Roche, she said goodbye to the East Coast to pursue her PhD in Biology at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, IN. She joined the lab of Dr. Felipe Santiago-Tirado where she learned about the wacky world of fungal pathogens through characterizing a gene of unknown function in *Cryptococcus neoformans* which turned out to be important for fungal mating.
While she loved cheese curds and many a pale ale from one of the 10+ microbreweries that South Bend had to offer, it was time to pack up and head back home to the East coast where she has found her new home in the Bhattacharyya lab as the resident “fun-gal”. Part of an ongoing fungal identification and susceptibility project, Liz is using clinical isolates of *Aspergillus fumigatus* from the CDC to identify Aspergillus isolates to the species level using an rRNA based strategy and understand what happens to the genetic profile of *Aspergillus* after exposure to antifungal treatments using an RNA-seq and Nanostring based approaches.
When not at the lab, you can often find Liz walking her rescue pup Skipper around Oak Square, organizing game nights with friends, or in the summer months glued to a beach chair with a good book. Her Sci-Twitter (now X) handle is @eliz985.

Eleanor Young, BS

Research Associate (2021 - )
Eleanor Young joined the Bhattacharyya Lab in June 2021 as a Research Assistant working on fungal diagnostics. She graduated from The University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Computational Biology where she studied the relationship between antibiotic resistance markers and synthetic gene construct stability. She is excited to learn RNA-seq and explore all Boston has to offer but is probably not prepared for New England winters.

Alyssa DuBois, BS

Research Associate (2023 - )
Alyssa studied Bioengineering and Global Health at Northeastern University (ironically located *south*east of where she grew up in Burlington, Vermont). She interned at a company developing diagnostic tools for sepsis and antibiotic resistance before joining the Bhattacharyya Lab to explore sepsis immunopathogenesis. In her free time, Alyssa loves listening to podcasts about infectious diseases, enjoying the outdoors, painting, and live music.

Leslie Lopez, BS

Research Associate (2024 - )
Leslie grew up in Warminster, PA and graduated from Amherst College with a degree in Biochemistry & Biophysics. Although an aspiring astronomer at first, her interest in microbiology emerged from mentors and teachings in high school and college and she's been exploring weirdly sensible things bacteria do ever since. Now in the Bhattacharyya lab, she's helping investigate the mechanism behind the inoculum effect in carbapenem-resistant Enterobacterales. Outside of the lab, Leslie loves hiking western Mass, watching films, and hunting down the ingredients for the best matcha latte.

Jonathan Chen

Undergraduate Researcher (2023 - )
Jonathan comes from Houston, TX where he spent high school obsessed with all things science and math. Now that he's an undergrad at Harvard planning to study Chemical and Physical Biology, Jonathan is excited to be part of the Bhattacharyya lab where he is exploring mechanisms of carbapenem resistance under the mentorship of Roby's team. When he's not learning the ropes of working in a lab, Jonathan is likely to be found catching up on sleep, running, or exploring Boston's delicious food options (suggestions welcome!)

Eden Seyoum

Undergraduate Researcher (2023 - )
Eden is from the lively city of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard College. Through her introductory courses at Harvard, she deepened her understanding of gene expression and protein structure and function, which further heightened her interest in understanding the molecular and cellular basis of life for the betterment of healthcare. Eden is enthusiastic to join the Bhattacharyya lab where she will be focusing on fungal diagnostics. During her free time, she loves to explore the city of Boston, read articles related to global health, listen to Afrobeat music, and indulge in exhilarating activities such as roller coaster rides.

Pun Sangruji

Undergraduate Researcher (2023 - )
Pun hails from the vibrant city of Bangkok, Thailand, embarking on a remarkable journey across the Pacific Ocean to escape the sweltering heat and oppressive humidity. He now finds himself as an undergraduate student at Tufts University, passionately pursuing a degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology, and nurturing a dream of one day practicing medicine.Fortunate enough to join the ranks of the Bhattacharyya lab, Pun is currently under the esteemed mentorship of Dr. David Roach. In this role, he wholeheartedly dedicates himself to aiding Dr. Roach in the development of cost-effective assays for profiling drug-resistant infectious bacteria, utilizing the cutting-edge SHERLOCK system. When not engaged in his work alongside Dr. David, you might stumble upon Pun in his room, savoring a peaceful nap, or find him tirelessly reviewing biochemical mechanisms with his friends (note: the napping is done alone).

Sara Gomez Villegas

Medical resident, affiliated researcher, and Friend of the Lab (2023 - )
Sara is from Medellin, Colombia. She was born an raised in the city of the "Eternal Spring" were she went to Medical School and fell madly in love with microbiology and molecular biology from the very first lecture. She graduated as an MD from the University of Antioquia - School of Medicine, but knowing that she wanted to become a physician-scientist, she immigrated to the United States to begin her training as a researcher. She trained as a post-doctoral fellow (2019-2022) at the Texas Medical Center (Houston, Texas) under the mentorship of Dr. Cesar Arias and then moved to Boston in late 2022 to start her residency training in Internal Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital. As she missed the bench and her dear bugs very much (the more resistant, the more she loves them), she sought, early during her intern year, an opportunity to go back to them in the few hours she is not sleeping or taking care of patients. She loves dancing (as any Colombian), listening to audiobooks (while working at the bench), and taking naps with her two cats: Gregorio and Luciano.

Lab alumni

Melanie Martinsen, BS, research associate (2019-2021). Current position: MD-PhD student, Brown University

Michelle Matzko, MD PhD, postdoctoral associate (2020-2021). Current position: Director of Clinical Research, AlloVir, and Infectious Disease physician, Brigham & Women’s Hospital

Alasdair Fletcher, summer undergraduate (2022). Current position: graduate of University College London (class of 2023). Next step: medical school!

Kyra Taylor, BS, research associate (2020-2022). Current position: Engineer I, Seres Therapeutics

Alex Jaramillo Cartagena, PhD, postdoctoral fellow (2020-2023). Current position: CPEP clinical microbiology fellow, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center

Selama Tesfamariam, summer BSRP undergraduate (2023). Current position: undergraduate student (senior), Howard University.