Dr. Micheal Gilmore will be presenting the The Eleventh Annual John C. Crano Lecture on Wednesday January 26, 2011 at noon in Victoria Hall, Room 129. His lecture is entitled "Multidrug resistant Staphylococcus aureus: Interaction with the cornea and development of new therapeutics" Dr. Gilmore is the Sir William Osler Professor of Ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Gilmore’s laboratory focuses on developing new ways to prevent and treat the most problematic multidrug resistant infections. He takes the general view that the core genome of the offending pathogens, enterococci and staphylococci, evolved to enable a stable commensal relationship with the host. However, this stability is undermined by environmental changes, changes in the host, or alteration of the genome of the microbe. He identifies traits on mobile elements and other genomic factors that destabilize the host commensal relationship, attempts to determine their origin, and define how they undermine the host/commensal balance. These studies involve elements of epidemiology, molecular genetics and comparative genomics, cell biology and pathogenesis.

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