Congratulations to Bassam el Hafi, who successfully defended his PhD thesis yesterday! He did a terrific job! Bassam connected microbial interactions to the complexity of human communication. Thanks also to Sarah Clark of the Anschutz School of Medicine who served at Bassam's outside examiner.

Happy to finally see this out! Bassam El Halfi (@bassamhafi.bsky.social - my first rotation student when I started my post-doc in @geiselbiofilm.bsky.social) did an amazing job investigating mechanisms of interspecies metabolic interactions. Check it out! #microsky journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Excited to share our latest work, driven by my recently graduated PhD student Kaitlyn Barrack, exploring the mechanisms of bacterial dysbiosis in the CF gut - including a role for a colorectal cancer-associated genotoxin in this competition. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... @kbarrack.bsky.social

Really cool story that I am proud to be a part of!

We had the O'Toole Lab Reunion on Sat here at Dartmouth, celebrating 26 amazing years - science is all about the people, and I have been fortunate to have a great bunch of folks in the lab over the years! And THANKS to all the lab members who did all the organizing!

Excited about our most recent paper lead by Kaitlyn Barrack, a minireview in JB comparing the CF and IBD guts - from microbiomes to physiologies. There are many similarities... journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/... @asm.org #JBacteriology @kbarrack.bsky.social

Grateful for George and his support through and through!

Words of Wisdom: Starting in 2019 at the lab retreat, senior grad students and postdocs shared words of wisdom based on their experiences to hopefully help the next generations navigate grad school and beyond. Here is the list with this year's additions: sites.dartmouth.edu/biofilm/word...

Day 2 of the retreat also means a lobster dinner, a view of the light house and some blueberry pie!

And for dinner, we carried on the tradition of paella, which was also a staple at the Kolter lab reunions when I was a postdoc!

Yesterday was the first day of the 23rd O'Toole lab retreat! We had science presentations from Sherry and Alex & a session on data wrangling from Sarvesh and Leslie. Plus I talked about my projects, & "Words of Wisdom" from senior grad students Kaitlyn and Bassam.