Microbiologist Dylan Shropshire studies Wolbachia's potential to fight mosquito-borne diseases worldwide.
Dylan Shropshire didn’t set out to become a microbiologist. As an undergraduate student studying insect behavior in Tennessee, he worked with flesh-feeding flies—critters he raised on rotting beef liver, no less. But while studying the flies, he began thinking about how the microbes in that complex environment might influence the lifestyle of the fly.
When it came time to consider graduate school, Shropshire was drawn to microbiomes and aimed to join a lab focused on this area. That curiosity led him to a doctoral program at Vanderbilt University, where he was introduced to Wolbachia, a type of bacteria that lives inside the cells of its insect hosts.
Read the full story on the College of Arts and Sciences News.
Spotlight Recipient
Dylan Shropshire
Assistant Professor