Fatima Aysha Hussain

Fatima Aysha Hussain is a microbial ecologist with a background in environmental engineering. She received her Ph.D. from MIT, where she studied bacteriophage-driven evolution of marine Vibrioin the laboratory of Martin Polz. During her Ph.D., she discovered that bacteria in the wild often evolve resistance to phages through the rapid acquisition of mobile genetic elements rather than through receptor mutations, as was previously thought. She was a 2021 recipient of the Schmidt Science Fellowship, which she used to pivot her research from the ocean to the vaginal microbiome and women's health. During her postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital with Douglas Kwon, she worked on the development of vaginal probiotics and vaginal microbiota transplantation as treatments for bacterial vaginosis. Now, in her own laboratory at Tufts University, she is studying phage-bacteria and bacteria-bacteria interactions in the vaginal microbiome, with the goal of designing ecologically informed microbial therapies to improve vaginal health.