Dr. Nye received her B.S. in Microbiology, M.S. in Bioinformatics, and her Ph.D. in Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology from the University of Michigan. During her Ph.D. in Dr. Lyle Simmons’ Lab she focused on mechanisms of gene expression in bacteria and was supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship. As a postdoctoral researcher in Dr. Scott Hultgren’s Lab, Dr. Nye developed and investigated the mechanism of action of a new class of antibiotics and studied the polymicrobial communities that underlie catheter-associated urinary tract infections. She has been supported by a NIH T32 Infectious Disease/Basic Microbial Pathogenic Mechanisms training grant and the W.M. Keck Postdoctoral Fellowship in Molecular Medicine.
Dr. Nye is currently a Senior Research Scientist in the Hultgren Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research interests are centered in identifying regulators of bacterial virulence and immune evasion strategies that can be targeted by antibiotic-sparing therapeutics. To this end, she has co-developed a technique that can be used to identify the proteins responsible for silencing the immune evasion locus, vls, in B. burgdorferi when it is outside the mammalian host. Identification of these proteins will allow us to target the silencing proteins to promote host immune clearance of the bacteria and combat persistent Lyme disease.