Steering Committee

Dr. Tyrrell Conway, Director and Principal Investigator
Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

Dr. Conway has over three decades of experience mentoring students, postdocs, staff, and faculty, leading large research projects, and administering a large academic department. He is a Regents Professor and Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology. He previously served as Department Head of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. NIH has funded his laboratory since 2000. His group focuses on mechanisms of nutrient acquisition by Escherichia coli in a mouse model of intestinal colonization. Dr. Conway prioritizes mentoring of the students and postdocs who do the work, including more than 150 undergraduate research assistants, 14 Master degree graduates, and 12 Doctoral recipients. Of the doctoral students, six are professors, five are scientific group leaders in the biotechnology industry, and one is a physician. A Diversity Supplement to his R01 award supported his most recent postdoc, who now holds a tenure-track position in academia. Dr. Conway's publication record includes 120 papers and book chapters describing the colonized state of E. coli, functional genomic analyses, and many aspects of bacterial metabolism. He was also a Project Leader on the first NIH-COBRE awarded to Oklahoma in 2000 and oversaw the first Biomedical Research Infrastructure Network (BRIN) award to Oklahoma. He co-wrote an NSF-EPSCoR proposal (2002) that created a transcriptomics core shared by five institutions across the state. Thus, the PI has decades of experience leading large academic research projects. During his time as Department Head he hired seven Assistant Professors who were either promoted and tenured or are making excellent progress toward tenure. He also guided three Associate Professors through promotion to full Professor. Dr. Conway’s top priority is mentoring faculty members. This is apparent by his most recent hires (Kirchberger and Stubbendieck), who are RPLs on this Phase I award, and he mentored the other RPL at OSU-STW (Lin) on a 2018 in-house Mentor-Mentee research award. Dr. Conway is fully committed to the success of these new investigators. 

 

Dr. Jerry Malayer, Associate Director (OSU-Stillwater)
College of Veterinary Medicine

Dr. Jerry Malayer brings extensive leadership experience to the OCMR. He serves as Senior Associate Dean for Research & Graduate Education in the College of Veterinary Medicine at OSU-STW, where he holds the position of Professor and McCasland Chair in the Department of Physiological Sciences. He has over 25 years of experience in academic veterinary medicine, including administering multidisciplinary research and training programs. By appointment of the Governor of the State of Oklahoma, he serves on the Oklahoma Science and Innovation Council (advisory to the Governor) and the OCAST Health Research Committee. He previously served as State Director for Oklahoma EPSCoR/IDeA. He was vice-chair of the National EPSCoR/IDeA Coalition Board of Directors, representing 27 member states. He is a past chair of the Research Committee of the Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges, a founding member of the Scientific Steering Committee for the Oklahoma Center for Adult Stem Cell Research, a member of the Advisory Board for the OCRID COBRE at OSU-CVHS. He serves on the Advisory Board of the Oklahoma Nathan Shock Center on Aging at OUHSC. These qualifications ideally suit Dr. Malayer’s role as Associate Director of the OCMR-COBRE at OSU-STW.

 

Mostafa Elshahed, Anaerobic Microbiology Core Director
Microbiology and Molecular Genetics

The Anaerobic Core Director is Dr. Mostafa Elshahed, a professor with more than 25 years of experience handling strictly anaerobic organisms and a research program focused on anaerobic habitats using culture-dependent and culture-independent strategies. The Anaerobic Core employs a PhD-level Manager and a staff scientist. The Director and Manager consult with researchers, provide anaerobic culture expertise, and maintain equipment. Core services include 1) anaerobic culturomics to enable high throughput culture isolation under a wide range of growth conditions and oxygen concentrations, 2) targeted enrichment to isolate specific microbes based on phenotypic traits, 3) sequence-guided culture isolation using nanobody-tags to specific organisms followed by cell sorting and targeted cultivation, 4) culture storage and record keeping, and 5) downstream services including bioinformatics consultation, PCR-amplicon and MALDI-TOF mass spectrometry-based identification, genome sequencing and automated annotation, metagenomic and meta-transcriptomic analysis, 16S rRNA gene-based microbial community analysis, and sequence submission to database repositories. These services are widely available to Oklahoma researchers and directly benefit OCMR research projects.

 

Dr. Gerwald Koehler, Associate Director (OSU-Center for Health Sciences)
Biochemistry and Microbiology

Dr. Gerwald Koehler currently serves as Interim Chair and Professor of Microbiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Microbiology at OSU-CHS. His doctoral training was with Drs. Karl-Heinz Schleifer and Wolfgang Ludwig at the Technical University of Munich studying ribosomal RNAs as phylogenetic markers. Dr. Koehler’s postdoctoral research at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) focused on the fungal pathogen Candida albicans, a line of research he continued at the University of Würzburg, Germany. The advent of genomics and microarray-based transcriptomics in C. albicans brought him back to Dr. Nina Agabian’s laboratory at UCSF. He joined the OSU-CHS faculty in 2007. His research on beneficial bacterial interactions with C. albicans spawned Dr. Koehler’s engagement in microbiome science. He collaborates with neuroscientists (including Dr. Vazquez Sanroman (Project 5 RPL), toxicologists, and animal scientists (Dr. Salak-Johnson). Through cooperation with forensic scientists, he made next-generation sequencing available for microbiota profiling and bacterial genomics at OSU-CHS. Dr. Koehler is the go-to expert for human microbiome sample collection/processing, sequencing, and data analyses. He serves as site-PI for microbiota sequencing in the NOURISH-OK project (R01 DK127464). Dr. Koehler also promotes microbiome research when teaching medical students at the College of Osteopathic Medicine in Tulsa and the Cherokee Nation in Tahlequah and graduate students in the Biomedical Sciences Program at OSU-CHS. He has mentored over 40 graduate students, many of whom have careers as biomedical or forensic scientists, faculty members, or physicians. As interim department chair, he promotes the careers of two tenured faculty members and mentors five tenure-track Assistant Professors (including Dr. Huang, Project 1 RPL). He is committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion in science. Fostering interdisciplinary and translational research with scientists from different disciplines, such as nutritionists, social scientists, and clinicians, is a crucial goal for his engagement in the Center. Thus, Dr. Koehler is prepared for his role as Associate Director of the OCMR-COBRE at OSU-CHS.