Research Interests
Bacterial food poisoning, Bacterial host response, Gene Regulation and Expression, Genetics, Inflammation, Microbiomics, Microorganisms
Departments
Lab Website
In Memoriam - Dr. Erin Christine Gaynor, February 26, 1968 – March 6, 2023
Dr. Erin Gaynor, a Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, has been a valued member of the departmental community for the last 20 years since her recruitment as an Assistant Professor in June 2003.
Sadly, she passed away in her home on Monday March 6, 2023. Erin’s sudden death at an early age has shocked and saddened those who knew and worked with her – her family, friends, colleagues, trainees, and the UBC science community.
Erin began her research journey at the University of California, San Diego, where she received a bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry & Cell Biology and General Literature (1990) followed by a PhD (1991-1997) with advisor Dr. Scott D. Emr, where she focussed on membrane trafficking and protein sorting.
Following her doctorate, Erin joined Dr. Stanley Falkow’s laboratory at Stanford University as a Post-Doctoral Fellow before joining UBC in 2003. In June, 2015, she became a full Professor and remained as so with the department until her passing.
Throughout her time at UBC, Erin and her team focussed on the prevalent fastidious pathogen Campylobacter jejuni, which is a leading cause of bacterial diarrheal disease in industrialized countries. Despite its prevalence, the mechanisms of virulence were unknown and under-researched. Erin’s lab tackled this problem using unbiased screens, selections, global stress response studies, and follow-up molecular, genetic and phenotypic analyses. Erin and her team made significant contributions to defining molecular mechanisms of C. jejuni through elegant in vitro studies, and with collaborators, her group also developed improved systems to better understand in vivo pathogenesis. Collectively, Erin’s thoughtful and creative approaches have significantly elevated our understanding of C. jejuni’s success in nature, commensal animal hosts, and susceptible human hosts.
Erin’s research was consistently well-funded, and she was very active in the community and a recognized expert/leader in the field, evidenced by her consistant invitations to speak at conferences and seminars, provide peer review for papers and grants, and participation and organization of national and international conferences.
Through these successes and experiences, she received notable awards and distinctions, including a Canada Research Chair in Bacterial Pathogenesis (Tier 2, 2003-2013), a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar Award (2004-2009), a Peter Wall Institute Early Career Scholars Program award (2004-2005), and a Canadian Bacterial Diseases Network Young Investigator Award (2003-2005).
As an educator, Erin taught a wide range of courses, from second-, and fourth-year undergraduate to graduate courses. Throughout her teaching, Erin created new avenues for learning using a variety of methods and frequently received excellent student reviews. Notably, students in her 4th year class commented that their term project, to identify novel practical solution for an important human health issue in bacterial disease, was their favourite course assignment at UBC.
Erin’s teaching philosophy revolved around encouraging and attending to students to help them improve, respecting the fact that everyone learns differently and comes into a course with different backgrounds and abilities, encouraging active learning, and fair and transparent examinations that allow students to improve through quality feedback. For her excellence in teaching, she was nominated for a Killam Teaching Award in 2008.
During her time at UBC, Erin also mentored a number of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who continue to contribute to health and research in their current careers, which include professorships, pharmacists, educators, and public health officials. They carry with them the legacy of the rich training environment in Erin’s lab and at UBC.
Outside of her scientific pursuits, Erin was an accomplished and enthusiastic athlete. She was a star tennis player throughout high school, and many of her colleagues from UBC and throughout her training remember her skill on the softball field (well before her arrival at UBC) and the joy she got from long-distance running.
Erin is remembered for her wit and creative drive to excel as a teacher and microbiologist, and her kind and caring heart. She will be deeply missed.
My research focuses on exploring the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis in the foodborne human pathogen Campylobacter jejuni. C. jejuni is the leading worldwide cause of bacterial food poisoning; however, we know very little about how it causes disease, particularly in comparison to other pathogens such as E. coli and Salmonella.
C. jejuni interacts closely with intestinal epithelial cells during infection, causes marked inflammation, and the bacteria can both invade and translocate through the intestinal epithelium. One focus of my research is to identify and characterize C. jejuni genes involved in the intimate bacterium-host cell interaction, utilizing several new genomic and genetic tools developed in my laboratory. Using DNA microarrays, I identified several sets of C. jejuni genes whose expression was affected by close contact with human intestinal cells. We subsequently found that one of the up-regulated genes controls the C. jejuni stringent response, a general stress response that we found is required for C. jejuni to invade and survive inside epithelial cells. Ongoing projects are aimed at expanding our characterization of this new virulence determinant, exploring how the C. jejuni stringent response is regulated, and characterizing other bacterial factors that intersect with this response. Studies to explore other genes identified in the microarray screen are also planned.
We are also interested in understanding several specific regulatory elements that are likely to be involved in C. jejuni pathogenesis and colonization. We have already identified and characterized a novel two-component signal transduction system that appears to be specifically required for in vivo colonization; we are additionally exploring another two-component system that was up-regulated in the presence of host cells. Future work will focus on identifying the genes regulated by each of these systems and how they contribute to the bacteria’s ability to colonize and cause disease.
Finally, two longer-term goals of my research center on trying to understand how C. jejuni can live harmlessly as a commensal in most animal species yet causes severe disease in humans, and how a specific host or transmission environment contributes to pathogenicity. We have already determined that laboratory passage in a high O2 environment compromises the ability of C. jejuni to colonize its natural zoonotic hosts. Future work is aimed at (a) exploring how C. jejuni genotypes and genome evolution contribute to the successful colonization of specific host systems, and (b) investigating host cell responses to C. jejuni infection.
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