Catherine Lozupone BS, MS, PhD

Catherine Lozupone, PhD is an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research focuses on the complex community of microorganisms that inhabit the human body (the microbiota) – particularly in the gastrointestinal tract. During her pre-doctoral work with Dr. Rob Knight and as a joint post-doctoral fellow with Dr. Knight and Dr. Jeffrey Gordon, she was heavily involved in the development of very popular tools for microbial community analysis; She is the primary developer of the UniFrac algorithm for comparing microbial diversity among many samples using phylogenetic information, and a contributor to the QIIME software package. Her substantial publication record in human microbiota research includes studies of the relationship between gut microbiota composition and age, culture, diet, obesity, inflammatory bowel diseases, and most recently HIV infection. Her lab is currently working to understand whether microbiota composition differences in HIV positive individuals are related to high rates of metabolic disease in this population and to understand whether loss of T regulatory cell inducing bacteria plays a role in chronic inflammation in HIV patients.