Dr. Joe Zackular is an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, where he studied the role of the gut microbiota in colorectal cancer in the laboratory of Dr. Patrick Schloss. He joined the laboratory of Dr. Eric Skaar at Vanderbilt University Medical Center for his postdoctoral fellowship, where he studied the role of dietary metals and nutritional immunity in Clostridium difficile infection. In August of 2018, he started his laboratory in the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. The Zackular laboratory is focused on understanding how interactions between the host, gut microbiota and pathogenic microbes impact human health and disease. The labs recent efforts center on understanding how the important nosocomial pathogen, C. difficile, interacts with resident gut microbiota during infection and how interspecies cross-talk impacts growth, behavior and virulence of this pathogen. Research in the Zackular lab draws from a number of diverse fields including microbial ecology, bacterial pathogenesis, biochemistry, host-pathogen interactions and microbiota research.