A/Prof Scott Handley
For the past 15 years, Scott has been involved in projects devoted to the advanced understanding of how microbial ecology and invasive pathogens operate and impact human health.
His view of how microbial ecology can contribute to disease comes in two forms:
The first is more traditional in which the introduction of an invasive organism (pathogen) negatively impacts either the host or the other members of the microbial community.
The second form is when an imbalance in the community itself leads to disease (dysbiosis).
His overall research goal is to better classify and test how alterations in community membership and function contribute to disease. To do this, he utilized high-throughput sequencing technologies, computational tools and community ecology analysis. Most of this research occurs in the mammalian gastrointestinal tract, however, lessons learned should be broadly applicable to studies at other sites.
