Ophelia Venturelli (Duke): AI+ Science Schmidt Fellows Speaker Series

Organized by the University of Chicago’s Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Agenda
4:00pm – 4:45pm:  Presentation
4:45pm – 5:00pm:  Q&A
5:00pm – 5:30pm: Reception

Meeting location
William Eckhardt Research Center. Room 401
5640 S Ellis Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637
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Abstract: Envision a world where the trillions of bacteria inhabiting our bodies become the frontier of personalized medicine, having the ability to shape our health, performance and even influence behavior. When in harmony, this teeming world of bacteria offers numerous health benefits. However, a shift in this delicate balance can lead to substantial negative health effects due to contrasting evolutionary objectives. Precision engineering of the gut microbiome that can add, remove or modify functional capabilities of the system holds tremendous therapeutic potential for personalized and precision medicine. However, the complexity of this system that encompasses hundreds of species, unknown interaction networks and mechanisms driving these interactions have precluded our ability to effectively manipulate this system to our benefit. A detailed and quantitative understanding of this system would enable the discovery of molecular and ecological design principles of the system as well as novel control knobs for steering the gut microbiome to desired states. By integrating bottom-up construction of microbial communities with computational models, we reveal the networks of interactions driving microbial community assembly, health-relevant metabolite production and human gut pathogens. Our work provides a foundation for exploring and exploiting the interaction networks driving microbial communities for precision medicine and beyond. Central to our approach, we are developing and applying data-driven mechanistic and machine learning models to predict, understand and design microbial communities.

Dr. Ophelia Venturelli is an Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University. The Venturelli lab aims to understand and engineer microbiomes using systems and synthetic biology for applications spanning human health, agriculture and bioprocessing. Dr. Venturelli began as an Assistant Professor at UW-Madison in Biochemistry after completing a Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship at UC Berkeley. Dr. Venturelli’s postdoctoral research focused on developing data-driven methods to decipher microbial interactions shaping assembly of synthetic human gut microbiomes and strategies to manipulate intracellular resource allocation by exploiting tools from synthetic biology. She received her PhD in Biochemistry and Biophysics in 2013 from Caltech, where she studied single-cell dynamics and the role of feedback loops in a metabolic gene regulatory network. Dr. Venturelli received numerous awards including Shaw Scientist Award (2017), Army Research Office Young Investigator Award (2017), the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation Innovation Award (2019), OVCRGE Early Career Innovator Award (2023), ACS Synthetic Biology Young Investigator Award (2023) and the Thomas Langford Lectureship Award (2024).

Parking
Campus North Parking
5505 S Ellis Ave
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