Dr. Anna-Lisa Lawrence receives the 2023 MacNeal Distinguished Dissertation Award.

Anna-Lisa Lawrence, Ph.D., '21, a former student in the O’Riordan lab, was awarded the 2023 Ward J. MacNeal Educational and Scientific Memorial Trust Distinguished Dissertation Award. This M&I prestigious award recognizes overall scholarly credentials; degree of innovation, creativity, and insight; scope and importance of the work; and effectiveness of the writing, including whether it is written in language that is reasonably understandable to readers in a variety of disciplines. Awardees are invited to give a lecture in Ann Arbor.

On Friday, April 12, 2024, Lawrence gave the 2023 MacNeal Distinguished Dissertation Award Lecture, titled "Elucidating immune cell drivers of Mycobacterium tuberculosis heterogeneity."

Lawrence defended her dissertation on December 7, 2021. Her dissertation title was “Human intestinal organoids as a model to study intestinal infection by the foodborne pathogen Salmonella enterica.” Her mentor, professor Mary O'Riordan, said: “Anna-Lisa’s sharp intellect and careful attention to detail led her to exciting discoveries and also made her a valued colleague for everyone in the lab.”

Lawrence started her postdoctoral training in October 2022, in professor Shumin Tan’s lab at Tufts University School of Medicine where she pursues her research on the spatial heterogeneity that occurs during Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection.

She has always been very interested in how pathogens can overcome host immunity to cause infection. In the O’Riordan lab, she focused on how the host responds to bacterial infection focusing on how similar pathogens elicit unique responses by the host. Now she is focusing on the bacterial side to understand how bacterial programming changes over the course of infection in order to continue successfully infecting its host. For this research, she is applying microscopy based techniques to probe how M. tuberculosis transcriptional programming changes spatially and temporally during infection. 

You get beautiful images and you can really see what’s going on!
—Anna-Lisa Lawrence, PhD

 

Higher magnification images of lesion core and cuff regions. These images reveal that at 6 weeks post infection more Mtb are active in the lesion core compared to in the lesion cuff where they reside within host immune cells.

About Anna-Lisa Lawrence
Lawrence was born, raised and entirely educated in Ann Arbor, attending Huron High School and doing all her college training at the University of Michigan (U-M). Since her parents are professors in biology, she was quite familiar with the department and with microbiology research. “There was always science at the dinner table,” she said. During her undergraduate studies, she did an internship in the Carruthers lab and that experience confirmed her liking for microbiology. Choosing U-M M&I was an easy decision and a natural path.

She started her graduate training as a U-M PIBS student and after a first rotation in the department of Cell and Molecular Biology, she switched to Microbiology & Immunology and joined the O’Riordan lab. From that experience, she recommended “to do a fun rotation because you never know what will happen when you take some of the pressure off.” She also encouraged students to ask a lot of questions to take advantage of the many resources available at Michigan.

During her first years of college, she was not considering a career in academia having seen first-hand how stressful it can be, but her passion for research took over. “In academia, you’ve more control over what you’re working on, as opposed to research in industry,” she said. “It’s a very competitive job market and you have to do well in your postdoc, but that's the goal and it’s worth it.” After years of research and months of writing, her first publication was hugely rewarding.

Lawrence also emphasized the importance of collaboration and of the lab team. “You don’t succeed doing work by yourself,” she said. “It’s a very important aspect of science and it makes it more fun too.”

You don’t succeed doing work by yourself. It’s a very important aspect of science and it makes it more fun too.
—Anna-Lisa Lawrence, PhD

She is also grateful for the two outstanding women principal investigators who have trained her. “As a woman in science, it’s very helpful to see and be mentored by other successful women in my field.”

Outside the lab, Lawrence enjoys the many restaurants and cafes in the Boston area, as well as hiking/checking out nearby parks and cross-country skiing when there is snow!

Dr. Anna-Lisa Lawrence gives the 2023 MacNeal Distinguished Disseration Award Lecture

More about Lawrence’s research interests:
Lesions that form in the lung during Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection are known to be highly heterogeneous. This heterogeneity includes differences in local environment, such as non-uniformity in ion or pH levels, which can affect the interactions of bacteria with the host. Changes in bacterial replication and metabolism resulting from differences in the environment can affect efficacy of drug treatments, separate from the ability of a drug to penetrate into the lesion. However, the extent and underlying causes of heterogeneity in different regions of the lesion are incompletely understood. My research aims to elucidate both bacterial and host transcriptional signatures during M. tuberculosis infection, to fully understand the spatial heterogeneity that occurs during infection.