Dr Elizabeth Chan

Division of Infection and Immunity
University College London

Elizabeth is a postdoctoral research associate with the Heyderman group, studying factors that promote carriage, transmission and disease by Streptococcal species. Since carriage frequently precedes and accompanies streptococcal invasive disease, a better understanding of carriage and transmission would hopefully lead to new therapeutics. Elizabeth’s PhD work with the Dillard lab at University of Wisconsin-Madison focused on the interspecies variation in inflammatory peptidoglycan fragment release by the human restricted pathogens Neisseria gonorrhoeae and N. meningitidis and related non-pathogenic Neisseria. Her undergraduate research project in the Kearns lab at Indiana University Bloomington was on Bacillus subtilis flagellar stator proteins. Elizabeth’s long-term research goal is to identify and understand factors that allow typically non-pathogenic bacteria, such as S. pneumoniae and N. meningitidis, to transition to a pathogenic lifestyle.

Links to selected publications:

1) Chan JM, Gori A, Nobbs AH, Heyderman RS. 2020. Streptococcal serine-rich repeat proteins in colonization and disease. Front Microbiol. 11:593356. (Review)
2) Wall EC, Chan JM, Gil E, Heyderman RS. 2021. Acute bacterial meningitis. Curr Opin Neurol 34(3):386-395. (Review)
3) Gori A, Harrison OB, Mlia E, Nishihara Y, Chan JM, et al. 2020. Pan-GWAS of Streptococcus agalactiae highlights lineage-specific genes associated with virulence and niche adaptation. mBio 11(3):e00728-20.