Ecologically-informed Microbial Therapies for Vaginal Health
Speaker: Faima Hussain, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Tufts University, Department of Biology, Medford, MA
Tuesday, November 10, 2026, 7:00pm via Zoom
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Fatima Aysha Hussain is a microbial ecologist with a background in environmental engineering. She received her Ph.D. from MIT, where she studied bacteriophage-driven evolution of marine Vibrio. She was a 2021 recipient of the Schmidt Science Fellowship, which she used to pivot her work from the ocean to the vaginal microbiome and women’s health. During her postdoctoral work at Massachusetts General Hospital, she worked on both vaginal probiotic development and vaginal microbiota transplantation (VMT) to treat bacterial vaginosis. Now, at Tufts University, she is leading a research program studying the ecology and evolution of the vaginal microbiome.
In this talk, she will highlight results from the first double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial of VMT for recurrent bacterial vaginosis, which demonstrated that microbial transplantation can shift recipient microbiomes toward donor-like states and restore L. crispatus dominance in a subset of individuals. She will also present recent work from her lab investigating strain-level ecological interactions among vaginal microbes, including bacteriocin-mediated antagonism and prophage dynamics. By integrating strain-resolved genomics, experimental microbiology, and clinical studies, her work aims to establish a mechanistic framework for the ecological and evolutionary processes that structure the vaginal microbiome and to inform the development of next-generation, ecologically-informed microbial therapeutics for vaginal health.
This continuing laboratory education activity is recognized by the American Society of Clinical Pathologists meeting the criteria for 1 CMLE