{"id":22098,"date":"2026-08-20T13:05:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-20T17:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/?p=22098"},"modified":"2026-08-20T13:07:34","modified_gmt":"2026-08-20T17:07:34","slug":"kara-eichelberger-qa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/news\/kara-eichelberger-qa\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding How Microbes Interact: Q&A with Kara Eichelberger"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

What happens when two very different microbes meet during an infection? For Dr. Kara Eichelberger, a<\/em> new faculty member in the University of Rhode Island’s Department of Cell and Molecular Biology<\/a>,<\/em> that question is <\/em>central to her research. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Eichelberger began her academic journey at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, before earning her Ph.D. in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. There, she studied how the bacterium that causes plague can lead to severe pneumonia. After graduate school, she moved to Nashville for postdoctoral research at Vanderbilt Health, where she began investigating how interactions between fungi and bacteria can influence disease.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q. What first sparked your interest in microbiology?<\/strong>

A. Science was always my favorite subject in school, especially biology. Then when I was on a summer break in high school, I visited my older cousin, who worked in a clinical microbiology lab. She showed me a few of the techniques for how they identify different bacteria, and I just thought it was so cool. It really inspired me to pursue microbiology research in the future!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What questions are you excited to explore in your research?\u00a0<\/strong>

My laboratory will explore questions that center around the overarching goal of studying host-pathogen interactions in the context of polymicrobial infection. I specifically study interactions between the fungus\u00a0Candida albicans\u00a0<\/em>and the bacterium\u00a0Staphylococcus aureus<\/em>. Some questions that I am excited to pursue are: How do fungal-bacterial interactions regulate microbial survival and virulence during infection? How do host immune cells respond differently when challenged with two microorganisms? What role does the host environment play in shaping the outcomes of fungal-bacterial interactions?\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

How would you explain your research to someone who isn\u2019t a scientist?<\/strong><\/strong>

I study how microbes communicate with each other and how that changes the way they can cause disease.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What will you be teaching at URI, and are there any new courses or research opportunities you\u2019re especially excited about?<\/strong>

I’m really excited to teach any courses related to microbiology and immunology. This upcoming year I will be teaching Introductory Medical Microbiology (CMB 201), and I will also be getting my research lab set up. In the future, I would love to develop a new course centered around medical\u00a0mycology or more broadly eukaryotic pathogenesis, which I think could be timely and interesting!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What are you reading, watching, or listening to lately (academic or otherwise)?\u00a0<\/strong>

For academic reading, there is a really cool paper that was just published in the journal Science, which describes how the fungal pathogen Candida auris<\/em> colonizes hair follicles on skin and changes the\u00a0host immune response to allow it to persist without being cleared.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For fun, I love watching sports and reality tv. This summer I have been enjoying streaming WNBA games, and I’m excited for some of my favorite shows (Dancing with the Stars and Traitors) to return this fall!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there anything else you’d like the URI community to know about you?<\/strong>

I’m really excited to be a part of CMB and the URI community starting this fall!\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What happens when two very different microbes meet during an infection? For Dr. Kara Eichelberger, a new faculty member in the University of Rhode Island\u2019s Department of Cell and Molecular Biology, that question is central to her research.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1089,"featured_media":22099,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1089"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22098"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22104,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22098\/revisions\/22104"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.uri.edu\/cels\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}