Keynote Speaker
Dr. Deborah Hung, MD, PhD
Deborah Hung received her PhD in Chemistry, working in Stuart Schreiber’s laboratory at Harvard University. Her work focused on characterizing the chemical and biological properties of the microtubule stabilizing molecule, discodermolide. She completed a postdoctoral position in John Mekalanos’ research group at Harvard Medical School, using a high-throughput screen to identify small molecule inhibitors of V. cholerae virulence factors. Dr. Hung received her Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School, completing a residency in internal medicine and fellowships in infectious disease and critical care medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, respectively.
Dr. Hung is now a core faculty member at the Broad Institute where she serves as the co-director of the Infectious Disease and Microbiome program. She is also an Associate Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology and the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Dr. Hung holds positions as an infectious disease physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital and is an attending critical care physician in the Medical Intensive Care Unit at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
The Hung research laboratory is a part of the Center for Computational and Integrative Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital. Her research group combines the fields of chemical and bacterial genetics/genomics to reveal and understand essential in vivo pathogen-host interactions in the hope of identifying potential therapeutic targets for antimicrobial development. The Hung lab is also interested in developing genomic approaches to comprehensively identify all bacterial genes required for infection and to use these approaches to identify small molecule targeted pathways and interactions.