Featured Faculty

Sydney Everhart is an assistant professor in the Department of Plant Pathology.  Her research interests are to characterize the emergence and spread of important fungal plant pathogens using spatiotemporal epidemiology, population genetics, and whole-genome sequencing.  The long-term goal of Everhart’s research is to develop a better understanding of how pathogens evolve under stress and how that relates to emergence of phenotypic traits, such as fungicide resistance.  Current research in the Everhart lab is focused on two important fungal plant pathogens, Sclerotinia sclerotiorum and Rhizoctonia solani, which affect several economically important crops in Nebraska.

Prior to joining UNL, Everhart was a postdoctoral fellow at Oregon State University and used bioinformatics techniques to sequence, assemble, and annotate the genomes of more than one hundred isolates of the devastating plant pathogen, Phytophthora ramorum, as part of a collaborative project.  She received her Ph.D. from the University of Georgia, where her research characterized the 3-dimensional patterns of disease outbreaks and population dynamics of the peach brown rot pathogen, Monilinia fructicola.

Everhart currently teaches courses of interest to microbiology students.  One is entitled “Disease Dynamics and Evolution” and taught in the spring semester of even-numbered years and the other is a programming course called “Introduction to R with Applications in Population Genetics and Advanced Epidemiology”, taught in the summer.  Aside from research and teaching, Everhart is passionate about being an advocate for women and minorities in science and when not doing science, she can be found mountain biking the paths and trails of Lincoln.

Limei Zhang joined UNL in 2015, after completing her Ph.D. training in the University of Saskatchewan and postdoc training at the California Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the structure-function relationships of transition metal-bound proteins (metalloproteins) in the host - pathogen interactions. Transition metals are used as a powerful tool of attack and defense for both hosts and pathogens owing to their versatile reactivity. To survive and thrive in the host, bacterial pathogens have evolved complex systems for acquiring, regulating and utilizing metals for their physiological functions and for defense against redox assaults launched by the host immune system. Such systems are promising targets for new antimicrobial therapies because of their imperative roles in the survival and virulence of the pathogens. To fully leverage the mechanisms of transition metal and metalloproteins usage in host-pathogen interactions into active drug design, a fuller understanding of the molecular details of these interactions and the action mechanisms of potential drugs targeting either essential metalloproteins or metal homeostasis is required. For this reason, the research in the Zhang group is devoted to fill the knowledge gap in this regard with current focus on the structure-function relationships of Fe-based redox sensors in Mycobacterium tuberculosis. The Zhang group aims to fill this knowledge gap by using biophysical and genetic approaches to define action mechanisms of these sensors, which will pave the way for designing drugs and/or strategies to interrupt functional Fe-based redox sensors in the pathogens.