Ophelia Venturelli, PhD
Position title: Associate Professor, Department of Biochemistry
Email: venturelli@wisc.edu
Phone: 608-263-7017
Address:
3204C Biochemical Sciences Building
440 Henry Mall
Madison WI 53726
- Lab Website
- Venturelli Lab
Research Interests
Understanding and engineering microbial communities across space and time
The Venturelli Lab aims to understand and engineer the spatiotemporal behaviors of microbial communities. We seek to elucidate the molecular and ecological design principles of microbial communities using tools from systems & synthetic biology. Our lab uses microfabrication methods to probe how spatial heterogeneity influences microbial communities and develops high-throughput methods to study microbial interactions in microbiomes. A major goal is to design novel strategies to precisely shift microbiomes to desired metabolic states.
We are fascinated by the complexity of the human gut microbiome and how to control microbiome functions. We study how microbial interaction networks impact the assembly, stability and functions of the human gut microbiome. In addition, we design novel circuits in key commensal or probiotic bacteria to sense and respond to environmental stimuli for therapeutic applications.