Tera Levin received her Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology in 2014 with Nicole King at the University of California, Berkeley. Her postdoctoral research was with Harmit Malik at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center before she joined the department in 2020.
The Levin lab studies the evolution of infectious diseases, seeking to understand how evolutionary “arms races” between hosts and pathogens dynamically shape the biology of immunity and pathogenesis. We approach these questions using a combination of high-throughput genetics, microbiology, and evolutionary genomics, focusing on the opportunistic pathogen Legionella pneumophila and its natural hosts, environmental amoebae.
Through this work, we are excited to discover general principles for how bacteria and hosts drive each others’ evolution.
OUR QUESTIONS INCLUDE:
How do new pathogens emerge from nature?
- What sorts of host-microbe or microbe-microbe interactions in the environment select for these new pathogens?
How do new mechanisms of immunity and pathogenesis evolve?
- What were the origins of modern genes that mediate host-microbe interactions?
- What are the molecular mechanisms of their interactions?
- And how do these mechanisms change over time?