I am trained as a molecular biologist. Previously, I studied a facultative anaerobic bacterium Clostridium difficile. I investigated the molecular basis of why certain strains carry genes for a toxin, while other strains lack these genes. I am very interested in gene regulation. Currently I am setting up my laboratory to investigate two projects. The first project deals with bacteriocins. A bacteriocin is a protein that kills bacteria belonging to the same or closely related species, that lack the genes for the protein. The first part of the project will focus on finding these bacteriocins in a number of bacterial strains for which there is some evidence of their existence. The bacteriocin proteins will be purified and characterized, and ultimately used to design probes for the genes for these bacteriocins. The second project will be a collaboration with a group of professors and students from several departments at Virginia Tech. My part of this project will be a molecular characterization of a number of different isolates of a plant pathogen that significantly impacts corn.