Bridget Barker | Director of HCMMC / Associate Professor in Biology

Director of HCMMC / Associate Professor in Biology

Bridget Barker

Associate Professor in Biology, Bridget oversees the HCMMC facility and supervises in vivo COVID-19 research effort and specialized in Coccidioides research. Professor Barker completed her Ph.D. in population genomics and ecology of Coccidioides at the University of Arizona in Tucson. She has returned to working on Coccidioides, expanding from the previous genomics work into transcriptomics, both in vitro and in vivo, to understand gene expression changes over the course of infection, as well as the morphological shift from mycelia/arthoconidia to spherules. Professor Barker is also interested in developing methods to detect Coccidioides in soil. Current funding is NIAID R21grant (sexual cycle in Coccidioides), a ABRC new investigator grant and PGP grant (Cocci DNA detection in soil development project) through NAU.