Research/Areas of Interest
Vaginal Microbiome
Microbial Ecology and Evolution
Phage-Bacteria Interactions
Bacterial Immunity
Biography
Fatima Aysha Hussain is a microbial ecologist with a background in environmental engineering. She received her Ph.D. from MIT, where she studied bacteriophage-driven evolution of marine Vibrio with Martin Polz. During her Ph.D. she discovered that bacteria tend to evolve resistance to phages in the wild through the rapid transfer of mobile genetic elements rather than the evolution of receptors, as was previously thought. She was a 2021 recipient of the Schmidt Science Fellowship, which she used to pivot her work from the ocean to the vaginal microbiome and women's health. During her postdoctoral work at Massachusetts General Hospital, she worked on both vaginal probiotic development and vaginal microbiota transplantations to treat bacterial vaginosis with Doug Kwon and Caroline Mitchell. Now, at Tufts University, she is leading a research program studying phage-bacteria and bacteria-bacteria interactions in the vaginal microbiome, aiming to ultimately design ecologically-informed microbial therapies for global vaginal health.