Johanson Awarded a Hutcheson Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship

David M. Johanson is the second of five awardees of the 2018 Hutcheson Undergraduate Summer Research Fellowship.   David is majoring in Biology, and is in the Distinguished Major Program.  David’s project this summer in the Alban Gaultier Lab has involved exploring the structural changes that occur in the gut microbiome of an experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis (EAE) mouse model.  He has been using a combination of computational approaches to analyze bacterial abundance data and discover taxa that may play an important role in the progression of EAE.  David’s overall research interest is the application of bioinformatics and functional genomics to the exploration of problems related to Multiple Sclerosis and autoimmune diseases of the brain.  He uses computational tools to analyze large sequencing datasets and make discoveries that lead to hypotheses that can be verified in the lab.