Current Winners

BIOGRAPHY

Dr. Michael Surette is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Interdisciplinary Microbiome Research in the Department of Medicine and Department of Biochemistry and Biomedical Sciences, in the Faculty of Health Sciences, McMaster University, and a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology (2018). Dr. Surette is also Director of the Farncombe Genomics Facility. He completed his BSc(Hons) in Biochemistry at Memorial University of Newfoundland with a thesis on the regulation of naphthalene degradation pathways in Pseudomonas putida. His PhD in Biochemistry at the University of Western Ontario investigated DNA transposition using Bacteriophage Mu as a model system in the lab of Dr. George Chaconas. Following a Postdoctoral Fellowship at Princeton University with Dr. Jeff Stock, on signal transduction and two component systems in bacterial chemotaxis, he joined the Bacterial Pathogenesis Research Group in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Calgary as an Assistant Professor in 1997. Dr. Surette’s work focused on gene expression and population behaviours in bacteria which eventually led to work on the polymicrobial nature of airway infections in cystic fibrosis patients. This work was the foundation to his ongoing research program on the human microbiome. In 2010 he moved to his current position in the Farncombe Family Digestive Health Research Institute at McMaster University. Dr. Surette’s research addresses the human microbiome of the respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts in health and disease across the life course. The lab is focused on developing high throughput culturing and phenotyping methods to investigate infectious disease and the microbiome, applying and improving next-generation sequencing approaches to characterize the microbiome, and how the microbiome changes with age.