My fellowship promises to be a large and diverse approach to a relatively simple but important problem- food safety.  Many labs are cooperating to address the problem of contamination if the food supply, and in this case it’s Salmonella in chickens.  I am part of a hearty triumvirate of labs that are looking at this subject using microbiological, immunological, and biotechnological approaches.  My particular lab will use the amazing tools available today to perform mass sequencing of the organisms that reside in a chicken’s gut in an effort to see whether treating birds with different diets or manufactured vaccines can cause a change in the type and/or distribution of microbes residing there. Awesome and amazingly relevant stuff.

From what we learn we must then try to assemble what we have learned and package it to meet the 4-H curriculum requirements in an effort to create a package of learning experiences that not only might work in a classroom setting but also in a non-traditional setting as well.

This is going to be a project requiring extraordinary coordination and collaboration.  We’ll have two years to get to a final product but it’s going to take some doing.  Stay tuned.