Assistant Professor
Department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology
Hometown: Portland, OR
Margaret Alexander is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the department of Medical Microbiology and Immunology. Dr. Alexander’s research is focused on understanding the mechanistic interactions between diet, the microbiota, and immune responses and the functional consequences of these interactions for autoimmune diseases. Dr. Alexander did her postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Francisco in the laboratory of Dr. Peter Turnbaugh in the department of Microbiology and Immunology. She attended Carleton College for her undergraduate degree in Biology and the University of Utah for her PhD in the lab of Dr. Ryan O’Connell studying immune cell communication.
Talks:
Diet-microbiota-immune crosstalk in autoimmunity
How do our diets impact autoimmunity? We’ll discuss our current research where our goal is to understand how our diets impact autoimmunity by influencing the crosstalk between our microbiota and immune system. By doing so we aim to improve therapies by providing bioactive compounds altered by diet and/or supplementing with microbial-produced immune-dampening compounds.