Andre Mu is a NOMIS Center Postdoctoral Fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (La Jolla, US).

Mu was born in Australia, and obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Melbourne in interdisciplinary sciences. There, he was awarded a competitive fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada to establish an international collaboration with the University of Calgary. Mu conducted his postdoctoral research at the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity at the University of Melbourne. Supported by the prestigious Australian Endeavour Research Fellowship, he collaborated with Professor Rob Knight at UC San Diego to investigate how the trillions of microbes in our gut, known as the gut microbiome, interact with drug-resistant bacterial pathogens.

Mu’s NOMIS research project will address why some patients develop severe illness while others seem to have no symptoms of disease despite the pathogens’ ability to infect, replicate and transmit. Using his expertise as a microbial ecologist and computational biologist, he aims to determine the compositional structure of gut microbiomes before and during infectious diseases in order to identify signature microbiome-markers that may predispose a person to acquiring infections. Such markers could help predict someone’s health outcomes after infection and help scientists engineer the gut microbiome toward cooperative host defense mechanisms during infection. Ultimately, Mu hopes to translate these observations from the bench to invent novel therapeutic applications for human diseases.