I defended my PhD in Neuroscience in June 2021 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, under the supervision of Dr. John Bienenstock. My thesis examined the role of extracellular vesicles in bacteria-host communication, with a specific focus on the microbiota-gut-brain axis.
I then completed a year-long postdoctoral fellowship (Oct 2021-2022) with Dr. Dwayne Roach at San Diego State University where I investigated how bacteriophages influence the immune system. I also worked to optimize methods of producing bacteriophages and assisted with compassionate-use human phage therapy cases.
Please see the Publications page for full-text PDFs of work I have contributed to.
Publications
Lymphotoxin-dependent elevated meningeal CXCL13:BAFF ratios drive gray matter injury
Ikbel Naouar, Andrei Pangan, Michelle Zuo, Syed Ali Raza, Kevin Champagne-Jorgensen, Jyot Patel, Angela Wang, Annie Pu, Lesley Ward, Jennifer S Y Ahn, Faizah N Sayeed, Jingwen Zhu, Elisabeth Pössnecker, Shoshana Spring, John G Sled, Bruno Cenni, Barbara Nuesslein-Hildesheim, Jeffrey L Browning, Anne-Katrin Pröbstel, Daniel S Reich, Jennifer L Gommerman, Valeria Ramaglia
Nature Immunology, Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2026 Jan
Alexandra Florescu, Michelle Zuo, Angela A. Wang, K. Champagne-Jorgensen, Mohammed Ariyan Noor, L. Ward, Erwin van Puijenbroek, C. Klein, J. Gommerman
Journal of Experimental Medicine, vol. 222(12), 2025, pp. e20241255
Mining for disease-associated microbial metabolites in an age-dependent model of multiple sclerosis
A. Pu, N. Fettig, Alexandros Polyzois, Gary Chao, Ikbel Naouar, L. S. Hohman, Marissa A Fontaine, Michelle Zuo, K. Champagne-Jorgensen, Julia Copeland, Donny Chan, Katherine M Davis, Ruoqi Yu, S. Popple, Natalia A. Carranza García, D. Guttman, Kathy D McCoy, V. Ramaglia, F. Schroeder, J. Gommerman, L. Osborne
bioRxiv, 2025
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