Danielle Steed, M.D., Ph.D

I am an Infectious Disease fellow at the Emory University School of Medicine and have the pleasure of working in the Levin laboratory on a collaborative project between this laboratory and my research mentors on the fellowship side, Dr. Michael Woodworth and Dr. Colleen Kraft.  Previously, I attended California State University – Los Angeles for my undergraduate degree. My undergraduate honor’s thesis focused on the synthesis of niobium and tantalum-centered Lewis acid catalysts using air-sensitive Schlenk techniques. I conducted my MD/PhD training though the Medical Scientist Training Program (MSTP) at the University of California San Diego and The Scripps Research Institute. My doctoral thesis characterized the mechanisms of resistance in S. aureus and Y. pestis against a novel class of antibiotics known as the arylomycins, which inhibit bacterial signal peptidase. During my Internal Medicine residency at Emory, I investigated the effects of fecal microbiota transplant (FMT) – traditionally used for recurrent C. difficile infection but also found to decrease carriage of multi-drug organisms and resistance elements in recipients – on the antimicrobial susceptibility profiles of organisms implicated in recurrent infections in patients before and after their FMT. My current infectious disease interests lie in clinical microbiology, antimicrobial resistance, and the gut microbiome. As an extension of my residency research, I am looking forward to characterizing changes in antimicrobial susceptibilities in pathogenic bacteria in response to FMT and the mechanism(s) that underpin strain switching/replacement from resistant to susceptible populations in this setting to support the use of FMT as a robust multi-drug resistant organism (MDRO) decolonization intervention.