News

The Utah Conference for Undergraduate Research (UCUR) is an amazing opportunity for undergraduate students involved in research to present their work. This year, we were lucky to have two of our undergraduate research assistants present at this conference in Cedar City, Utah.

Sarah Dallas gave an oral presentation to share results from her thesis which was focused on examining parents’ expectations for the management of pediatric diarrhea within the formal healthcare sector in Bangladesh. She is also currently finalizing her manuscript to submit for publication.

Jane Putnam also gave an oral presentation for her thesis work which was a study exploring the motivations, expectations, and experiences of parents that take their child with pediatric diarrhea to a village doctor in Bangladesh. She is in the final stages of preparing her manuscript for publication as well.

Our lab is always excited to support undergraduate research and we are very proud of Sarah and Jane for presenting at UCUR and for all their hard work on these projects!

An important aspect of the research done in our lab is informing and contributing to advancements in global health. Aparna Mangadu (Research Analyst) and Dr. Melissa Watt (Qualitative Collaborator) had the exciting opportunity to attend The Consortium of Universities for Global Health (CUGH) 2025 Annual Meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. During this conference, our team learned about ongoing cutting-edge global health research, networked with amazing individuals from other academic institutions and organizations, and participated in discussions surrounding current global health challenges.

Aparna also presented a poster sharing our qualitative findings surrounding antibiotic stewardship from our collaborative work with the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b) and Ashraful Islam Khan.

Attending CUGH 2025 was such a wonderful experience as we look forward to continuing our work in global health. We are very grateful to our international, national, and local collaborators for all the extensive work they place into these projects and are excited to continue sharing our work.

This December, Daniel Leung (PI), Aparna Mangadu (Research Analyst), and Melissa Watt (Qualitative Collaborator) had the unique opportunity to travel to Nepal and Bangladesh to engage and interact with our global collaborators.

From December 8-10th, the team attended the 17th Asian Conference on Diarrhoeal Disease and Nutrition (ASCODD) in Kathmandu, Nepal, where they engaged in discussions and seminars related to emerging global infectious diseases, pioneering strategies for diarrhea and nutritional challenges across Asia, and the exploration of clinical case studies within the field of infectious diseases. The team was also able to meet and chat with our colleagues from the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), who were partners in developing and organizing the conference.

Daniel Leung (PI) also gave a talk on the use of machine learning for diarrheal etiology prediction.

Following ASCODD, the team traveled to Dhaka, Bangladesh to visit the primary icddr,b site and discuss the next phase of our ongoing R21-33 grant with our collaborators.

With the unique opportunity to visit the Sitakunda Upazila in the Chattogram District, our team was able to meet and interact with two village doctors that had been previously identified in a recently published study.

Along with this, our collaborators at icddr,b arranged and accompanied us for a tour of the Bangladesh Institute of Tropical and Infectious Diseases (BITID).

As always, we are very grateful for these unique opportunities to not only collaborate with our global partners but also travel to the study sites to gain a more comprehensive understanding of the impact from our research efforts. We are excited for the next steps in our research and the prospective global health impacts.

This November, current members and lab alumni traveled to New Orleans, Louisiana for the 2024 ASTMH* annual meeting. We had several people presenting posters, giving oral presentations, and hosting seminars.

Undergraduate research assistants, Sarah Dallas and Jane Putnam, presented posters at their first ever conference! Their presentations showcased the lab’s qualitative work surrounding antibiotic stewardship in Bangladesh. This was also their first time making research posters and both did a wonderful job!  

Sharia Ahmed (lab alumna) presented two posters and gave an oral presentation on clinical prediction of cholera.

Daniel (PI) organized and led several “Meet the Professor” Sessions and participated in a “Cholera Vaccine Debate”.

Conferences such as ASTMH provide us with a great opportunity to not only share our ongoing research but also reconnect with collaborators, lab alumni, and others who share similar research goals. As always, we had a wonderful time catching up during our team dinner, exploring the lively city of New Orleans, and of course, enjoying delectable beignets!

See you again next year in Toronto, ASTMH!

*ASTMH = American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene

The month of October was filled with celebrations for our lab. To congratulate Carmen and Olivia moving forward in their careers (and departing our lab), we went out for a celebratory lunch at Indochine Vietnamese Bistro. With lots of delicious food, great conversations, and thoughtful gifts, who wouldn’t enjoy an outing like this?

October was also a popular month for lab member birthdays. As always, birthday potlucks reveal that some of our lab members are amazing chefs/bakers! With homemade delectable treats and other delicious foods from Hruska’s and Trader Joes, it is always an enjoyable time to celebrate together as a lab. Happy birthday to Paola, Kilee, and Aparna!

In July 2024, current lab members and alumni came together to celebrate The Leung Lab’s 10^th anniversary! The evening was filled with fantastic conversations, introductions for those meeting for the first time, and delicious food from Café Rio. We are looking forward to the continued growth of the lab and future gatherings!

The summer has flown by and among the highlights were several lab potlucks. The photos above don’t do it justice, but our team has some amazing cooking skills. Reasons for our gatherings included: 1) the receipt of institutional training grants by our PhD students Owen and Daniel, 2) welcoming our summer intern, Andrew, who is part of the NARI (Native American Summer Research Internship) program, 3) Farewells to Taliman and Melanie, and 4) Birthdays of Shubhi, Olivia, Daniel, and Owen. We’re looking forward to more reasons to have potlucks this fall!

Last weekend was our annual lab Holiday Party, and we took the occasion to celebrate the recent accomplishments of a couple of our graduate students. Owen Jensen and Daniel Labuz, students in the Molecular Biology graduate program, passed their prelims! Owen’s thesis will be on, “Determining the role of mucosal-associated invariant T cells in mucosal adaptive immunity”, and Daniel will work on, “De novo DNA methylation of mucosal associated invariant T cells effector loci during sepsis.” We are glad that this (stressful) part is over with, and we are looking forward to seeing the results of their proposed studies!

As we mentioned in a previous post, recently at the ASTMH conference, we held a kickoff meeting for a project titled, “Development of a Bayesian diagnostic for etiological management of pediatric diarrhea.” This project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, spearheaded by their Innovative Technology Solutions team. Our overarching goal is to develop and pilot a Smartphone App that will help clinicians in LMICs better manage kids with diarrhea. The “Bayesian” part is that this App would incorporate clinical, epidemiological, and environmental “priors”, such as climate data and clinical features of previous patients, into a clinical prediction App. For example, the App would ask the clinician to enter certain symptoms that the patient came with, computationally combine this information with cloud-based “priors” data (e.g. recent weather patterns, aggregate data from previous patients), and output the probability that a certain patient’s diarrhea is caused by a virus vs. bacteria. The clinician can then make a more informed decision about whether to give the patient an antibiotic or not. After we develop and validate the App, we will pilot it at two international sites. We are thankful for the expertise of our collaborators at Brown University, University of Florida, and University of Maryland, who are all part of this grant, as well as input from those at Institute for Disease Modeling and University of Virginia. In the end, we are really excited to have the opportunity to translate some of our current analytical efforts deriving prediction rules into an application that clinicians can use!

Last week, 5 members of our group attended the Annual Meeting of the ASTMH (American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene) in New Orleans. We experienced some amazing Cajun food, street Jazz, and of course, the charms of the French Quarter. Some highlights from our group:

• Postdoc Shubhi Trivedi presented her work on respiratory immunity after intestinal infection
• Internal Medicine Resident Melissa Pender presented her work on clinical predictors differentiating causes of traveler’s diarrhea, a collaborative work with investigators at AFRIMS (Thailand) and CIWEC (Nepal)
• Tai Diep, our collaborator at the Pasteur Institut in Ho Chi Minh City, presented our work on use of dried blood spots in cholera serosurveillance.
• We kicked off our “Bayesian Diagnostics for Pediatric Diarrhea” project in a meeting with our funder (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) and collaborators (Brown University, University of Florida, University of Maryland)

Cole’s going away party (great to have significant others participating)

Michael’s going away potluck (who knew that our lab has such awesome cooks!)

Over the summer, we’ve had a couple of bittersweet parties, where we celebrated achievements, welcomed new PhD students, and sent off two of our lab members. Michael Graves is leaving us to attend medical school in Iowa, and Cole Anderson is leaving to take a scientist position in the military. We share their excitement about their new positions, but are sad to see them go.

We welcomed several new faces. Owen Jensen and Daniel Labuz are joining us as PhD students in the Molecular Biology program. Our new postdocs are Taliman Afroz (she had completed her PhD on E. coli sugar utilization pathways in Chase Beisel’s lab at NC State), and Ben Brintz (he completed his PhD on N-Mixture Models in Lisa Madsen’s group at Oregon State).

We also celebrated the start of a couple of R01 grants that we received from the NIAID: “Estimating cholera burden with cross-sectional immunologic data,” and “Development of clinical decision tools for management of diarrhea of children in high and low resource settings.”

Last week, we went out to Asian Tao to celebrate a few of our team’s recent achievements:

1) We received an R01 award, a 5-year grant from the NIH/NIAID. We will be working in collaboration with scientists at the icddr,b in Dhaka, Bangladesh to examine the role of MAIT cells (our favorite innate-like T cell) in the generation of antibody responses during cholera infection and vaccination. We are trying to address the problem that currently available oral cholera vaccines don’t work as well in young children as in older children and adults, which is likely related to the inability to generate polysaccharide-specific antibody responses in this population. Based on our earlier studies (in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and Mike’s paper detailed below), we postulate that MAIT cells may provide help to B cells to generate such responses.

2) Cole, our postdoc, received a 2-year spot on the T32 in Genomic Medicine training grant from the NIH/NHGRI. In collaboration with the Rondina lab at the University of Utah, he will focus on the epigenetic and transcriptional events that occur in MAIT cells during the course of human sepsis.

3) Mike, our former postdoc who is now a R&D scientist at ARUP, had his paper published in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. In this publication co-authored with Shubhi and Anita, Mike showed in a series of ex vivo experiments that human MAIT cells have the capacity to help B cells differentiate and produce antibodies.

4) Boris, our undergraduate student majoring in material science engineering, received an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) award. He will spend this semester working on a project titled, “Effect of HIV infection on Mucosal Associated Invariant T (MAIT) Cell Plasticity.”

Congratulations to everyone for their achievements!

Congratulations to Anita Iyer, PhD, postdoctoral fellow in our lab, who has been selected to receive an ASTMH (American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene) Annual Meeting Award, supported in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She will receive funding to attend the conference, held November 13-17 in Atlanta, to present her research on immune responses to oral cholera vaccine in internally displaced persons in South Sudan.

Congratulations to our Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) recipients for their poster presentations at recent research conferences! Joe Fuell presented a poster on “Immune Response to Native American Antidiarrheals” at the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research in February (left photo), and Amanda Barrett presented a poster on “Use of Stool Immune Transcriptome to Predict Recurrent Clostridium difficile Infection” at the University of Utah Undergraduate Symposium last week (right photo).

The Leung lab has been awarded a grant from the University of Utah’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science and Program in Personalized Health to identify biomarkers for refractory Clostridium difficile infection.

Clostridium difficile infection (CDI) is the most common hospital-associated infection, responsible for an estimated 14,000 deaths a year in the US. While there are established antibiotic treatment regimens for CDI, up to 25% of treated cases relapse or recur. In collaboration with investigators from ARUP Laboratories and Intermountain Healthcare, we will be using cutting-edge genomic techniques to identify those who are at risk of developing recurrence of disease.

Announcement and details of other recipients here: http://healthcare.utah.edu/publicaffairs/news/2015/06/06-30-15_Precision_Medicine_Grants_Announcement.php
 

Congratulations to our 3 University of Utah Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) grantees! Amanda, Joe, and Mait all received summer stipends to work on their research projects in our lab.

	Amanda Barrett The purpose of my UROP project is to determine if there are transcriptomic predictors for patients with recurrent Clostridium difficile infection (CDI). From stool samples, we will isolate host mRNA and analyze gene expression using RNA sequencing and qPCR. Both types of analysis should aid in comparing genes of interest and compare results between patients with recurring CDI, cured CDI, and a control group.
	Joseph Fuell Hundreds of years before the arrival of Western Medicine to the Salt Lake valley Native American tribes used local herbs to treat digestive problems such as diarrhea, stomach pains, and other intestinal problems.  My project consists of testing various roots and seeds used by Native Americans such as Rosa Woodsi, Grindelia Squarossa, Rumex crispus and Rhus trilobata.  These compounds are being tested for toxicity and activity on human intestinal and immune cells.
	Maitland Wiren The purpose of my UROP project is to study the activation of mucosal-associated invariant T (MAIT) cells. It is already known that some riboflavin metabolites activate MAIT cells. I will test to see if molecules produced by other types of disease-causing bacteria activate MAIT cells in a similar way. The overall goal is to get a better understanding of how diarrhea-causing bacteria affect our immune system.