Laura<br>Carroll | The CompMicroLab <span>@</span> UmU

🧫🧬👩🏻‍💻 Fighting bacterial pathogens using bioinformatics

Food, wine, and cat enthusiast 🧀🍷🐈

🧬 About me

I currently serve as Group Leader for the CompMicroLab @ UmU. As a SciLifeLab and Wallenberg Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS) Fellow, I'm interested in developing and utilizing bioinformatic approaches to monitor and combat the spread of bacterial pathogens.

I serve as Group Leader for the CompMicroLab @ UmU in beautiful Umeå, Sweden!

🔬 My current research

(Meta)genomic sequencing is playing an increasingly pivotal role in clinical and public health microbiology. As such, the amount of publicly available (meta)genomic data derived from microbes--including pathogens--is growing rapidly. As a computational microbiology group, we develop and utilize bioinformatic approaches, which can leverage these massive data sets to improve pathogen surveillance, source tracking, outbreak detection, and risk evaluation efforts.

Specifically, we develop and deploy

phylodynamic models, which can be used to track the evolution and transmission of zoonotic pathogens between animal reservoirs and the human population
machine learning approaches, which can be used to identify microbial genomic determinants associated with phenotypes of clinical and industrial importance (e.g., host disease states, antimicrobial resistance phenotypes)
multi-omics methods, which can be used to predict pathogen virulence potential

We are also passionate about bridging the gap between experimental and computational microbiologists by making (meta)genomic data analysis methods accessible and approachable to all through teaching and outreach.

🧬 To learn more about our research, check out our current and ongoing projects, as well as our recent publications.

🧬 To learn more about the tools we develop and maintain, check out our software page.

🧬 To view our teaching, extension, and outreach materials, check out our teaching page.

We develop and utilize bioinformatic methods, which can query massive amounts of microbial (meta)genomic data.

🌎 My scientific journey

I grew up in a small town in Michigan's (very remote, very beautiful, and very snowy) Upper Peninsula--a less populated, American version of Umeå. I moved eight hours away to attend Michigan State University, where I graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Genomics and Molecular Genetics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. I received my doctorate from Cornell University in 2019, where I received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) award to study the genomics and epidemiology of foodborne pathogens under the direction of Dr. Martin Wiedmann. I additionally spent my graduate years as a research intern at IBM Research Almaden and as a visiting NSF Fellow at ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland. From 2019 to 2022, I worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Georg Zeller's computational metagenomics group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany. In 2022, I was hired as a fellow through Sweden's SciLifeLab and Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS), a 12-year initiative aimed at recruiting and training the next generation of data-driven life scientists. Since then, I've been serving as Group Leader for the CompMicroLab @ UmU--and loving every minute of it!