Laura Carroll - IceLab

Profile

Affiliate Assistant Professor.

Fighting bacterial pathogens using bioinformatics. Food, wine, and cat enthusiast.

(Meta)genomic sequencing is playing an increasingly pivotal role in clinical and public health microbiology. As such, the amount of publicly available (meta)genomic data derived from microbes—including pathogens—is growing rapidly. Laura Carroll’s research group develops and utilizes bioinformatic approaches, which can leverage these massive data sets to improve pathogen surveillance, source tracking, outbreak detection, and risk evaluation efforts.

Laura grew up in a small town in Michigan’s (very remote, very beautiful, and very snowy) Upper Peninsula—a less populated, American version of Umeå. She moved eight hours away to attend Michigan State University, where she graduated in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Genomics and Molecular Genetics, as well as a Bachelor of Arts degree in History. She received her doctorate from Cornell University in 2019, where she received a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) award to study the genomics and epidemiology of foodborne pathogens under the direction of Dr. Martin Wiedmann. She additionally spent her graduate years as a research intern at IBM Research Almaden and as a visiting NSF Fellow at ETH Zurich in Basel, Switzerland. From 2019 to 2022, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Georg Zeller’s computational metagenomics group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany.

In 2022, Laura was hired as a Fellow through Sweden’s SciLifeLab and Wallenberg National Program for Data-Driven Life Science (DDLS), a 12-year initiative aimed at recruiting and training the next generation of data-driven life scientists. Currently, as a DDLS Fellow in Umeå University’s Department of Clinical Microbiology, Laura’s research group develops and deploys (i) phylodynamic models, which can be used to track the evolution and transmission of zoonotic pathogens between animal reservoirs and the human population; (ii) machine learning approaches, which can be used to identify microbial genomic determinants associated with phenotypes of clinical and industrial importance (e.g., host disease states, antimicrobial resistance phenotypes); and (iii) multi-omics methods, which can be used to predict pathogen virulence potential. She is also passionate about bridging the gap between experimental and computational microbiologists by making (meta)genomic data analysis methods accessible and approachable to all through teaching and outreach.

When she’s not playing around with (meta)genomic data, Laura enjoys swimming, hiking, camping…and any activity that revolves around food or cats!

Current Projects

Machine learning approaches for novel secondary metabolite discovery

with Dr. Georg Zeller (EMBL, Germany)
Genomic surveillance of antimicrobial resistant (AMR) foodborne zoonotic pathogens along the food supply chain

with Drs. Martin Wiedmann (Cornell University, USA), Claudia Guldimann (LMU Munich, Germany), and Rachel Cheng (Virginia Tech, USA)
In silico tools to improve Bacillus cereus group surveillance and risk evaluation

with Drs. Jasna Kovac (Penn State, USA) and Johan Henriksson (UmU)
Genomic surveillance and source tracking of foodborne pathogens in South Africa

with Dr. Itumeleng Matle (Onderstepoort Veterinary Research, South Africa)

The Latest Posts

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February 14 Lunch Pitch: factors affecting lifespan

February 14 Lunch Pitch: factors affecting lifespan

February 14 Lunch Pitch: factors affecting lifespan February 14, 2024 Watch Lunch Pitch Video Pitch 1: Verena Kohler, Assistant Professor at Department of Molecular Biology. [...]

Icelabbers at the Scandinavian Winter Swimming Championship

Icelabbers at the Scandinavian Winter Swimming Championship

Icelabbers at the Scandinavian Winter Swimming Championship Doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows in IceLab today are drivers of a highly social, open and adventurous work culture. Recently six of them took this [...]

Scale: Book Club Snapshot

Scale: Book Club Snapshot

Scale: a Book Club Snapshot ‘Scale’ looks at different scaling laws throughout living systems, cities and companies. The IceLab book club enjoyed reading this in the autumn term 2023 and all the [...]

Happy Holidays and New Year

Happy Holidays and New Year

Happy Holidays and New Year from IceLab Happy Holidays and New Year from the Integrated Science Lab (IceLab) to all our our members, affiliates, funders, collaborators, and [...]

2024 Lunch Pitches

2024 Lunch Pitches

Sign up to give a Lunch Pitch in 2024 IceLab once again invites researchers to share their ideas and engage in discussion with a multidisciplinary audience [...]

For the love of fun in science

For the love of fun in science

For the love of fun in science IceLab's culture creates space for collaboration in a number of ways, including by embracing fun. IceLab multidisciplinary postdoctoral fellow Josephine Solowiej-Wedderburn is one of [...]