MycoTalks S6 E3: Eric Dang and Minh-Hong Nguyen

Описание: 00:00:00 Introduction and Welcome to MycoTalks S6 E3
00:02:07 First Speaker - Eric Dang: Barrier tissue immunity to pathogenic fungi
00:31:50 Second Speaker - Minh-Hong Nguyen: Within-host genotypic and phenotypic diversity of Candida causing bloodstream infection
01:02:00 Q&A and discussion session

Speakers Biographies
Dr. Dang received his undergraduate degree in Public Health Studies from Johns Hopkins University in 2010, where he studied T cell differentiation in the lab of Dr. Drew Pardoll. After college, he spent a year in London working in Dr. Anne O’Garra’s lab at the National Institute for Medical Research in Mill Hill. After a brief stint in medical school, he performed his graduate thesis work at the University of California, San Francisco in the laboratory of Dr. Jason Cyster. There he studied the role of oxysterols and cholesterol metabolism in regulating macrophage inflammatory responses. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2018, Dr. Dang joined the laboratory of Dr. Hiten Madhani at UCSF for his postdoctoral work. There he used forward genetic approaches to study mechanisms of immune system manipulation by the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans. In 2022, Dr. Dang was hired as a tenure-track investigator in the NIAID Laboratory of Host Immunity and Microbiome and then in 2025 he moved to the Ragon Institute of MIT/MGH/Harvard in Cambridge, MA, where he holds an academic appointment in the Department of Immunology at Harvard Medical School. His group focuses on understanding the crosstalk between fungal pathogens/commensals and mammalian hosts.

Dr. Nguyen is a tenured Professor of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh and Co-Director of the Center for Healthcare Mycology and Fungal Genomics. She also serves as Director of Transplant Infectious Diseases and the XDR Pathogen Laboratory at UPMC. Her longstanding research interests focus on the epidemiology of fungal infections, antifungal drug resistance, fungal diagnostics, and the molecular pathogenesis of Candida infections. Dr. Nguyen is an active contributor to international expert panels on the diagnosis and management of aspergillosis complicating influenza. She serves on the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) guideline panels for aspergillosis and for infectious complications associated with immunotherapy. In addition, she is a member of the 2025 Global Candida Guidelines group, jointly convened by the European Confederation of Medical Mycology (ECMM), the International Society for Human and Animal Mycology (ISHAM), and the American Society for Microbiology (ASM). Most recently, as Principal Investigator of NIH-funded projects, her research group has used MinION Nanopore whole-genome sequencing to demonstrate that bloodstream infections (BSIs) caused by Candida species often consist of genetically and phenotypically diverse clonal populations that may differ in antifungal resistance determinants and virulence. These findings challenge the traditional paradigm of single-organism bloodstream infection and support a new population-based model of candidemia.