Deirdre Ricaurte is an MD PhD student in the laboratory of Harris Wang, where she is interested in using high-throughput sequencing technologies to investigate the gut microbiota-drug interface. More specifically, she uses genomics and transcriptomics to mechanistically characterize physiologically relevant interactions occurring between gut bacterial strains and top prescribed pharmaceutical compounds.

Deirdre earned her undergraduate degree at Princeton University, where she studied molecular and cellular biology. She worked as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratory of Bonnie Bassler, studying the impact of flow environment on competitive dynamics within Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms. Before beginning her MD PhD, she spent one year in the laboratory of Victor de Lorenzo in Madrid, where she used Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) to optimize a P. aeruginosa chassis for bioremediation purposes.