Eric Schiff presented research to Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors

Eric Schiff, an undergraduate student at NIMML, presented the research he has been working on to the Board of Visitors of Virginia Tech, the governing authority for Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. The Board is composed of 14 members, 13 of whom are appointed by the Governor. Before their regular committee meeting on November 17, 2013, Virginia Tech selected 10 undergraduate students to present posters of the undergraduate research experience they have been involved in. Eric presented the work NIMML has done pertaining to Clostridium difficile infections and the efforts to find novel therapeutics to combat the disease. NIMML has used a variety of techniques including animal models, computational and molecular models, as well as high through-put techniques such as RNA and DNA sequencing in order to uncover the interactions between the host, the microbiome, and C. difficile. In doing so, the lab has identified certain targets such as PPARγ to activate with drugs, novel natural compounds, and probiotics to help ameliorate the inflammation and damage caused by C. difficile. The poster can be found here.

A link to Virginia Tech’s Board of Visitors is here: http://www.bov.vt.edu/index.html

About NIMML

The NIMML Institute is a 501 (c) (3) non-profit public charity foundation focused on a transdisciplinary, team-science approach to precision medicine at the interface of immunology, inflammation, and metabolism. The NIMML Institute team has led numerous large-scale transdisciplinary projects and is dedicated to solving important societal problems by combining the expertise of immunologists, computational biologists, toxicologists, modelers, translational researchers, and molecular biologists. The Institute is headquartered in Blacksburg, VA. For more information, please visit www.nimml.org or contact pio@nimml.org.