James B. Winans

What initially drew me to this field was an interest in developing bacteriophage as therapeutics. This soon made me wonder, how can the massive size of a phage (relative to antibiotics) ever hope to be sufficiently pervasive as to eradicate infections, particularly those produced by biofilms? Immediately I became broadly interested in this ancient relationship between bacteria and phage. Specifically, my research focuses on how multispecies microbial communities can evade infection by lytic phage and the tradeoffs involved in this protection, as well as characterizing the importance of lysogeny within biofilms.