BME 280B Seminar: Speaker Dylan Shropshire – “How did Wolbachia become Earth’s most pervasive animal symbiont?”

Presenter: Dylan Shropshire, Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University

Description: Maternally transmitted Wolbachia bacteria inhabit roughly half of all arthropod species, making them likely the most common animal-associated microbe on Earth. Wolbachia alter host reproduction, persist across deep evolutionary timescales, and move into new host species in ways that we are only beginning to resolve. Wolbachia‘s biological success now also underpins global biocontrol programs aimed at suppressing arboviral disease, lending applied urgency to a foundational question: how did a single bacterial lineage come to dominate the animal world? In this seminar, I will draw on my recent and ongoing work to explore facets of this question, leveraging Wolbachia‘s evolutionary diversity and wet-lab tools to define the mechanisms driving this microbe’s success across the animal world. Collectively, this work aims to clarify the determinants of Wolbachia‘s natural prevalence and to sharpen the predictive frameworks underpinning Wolbachia-based biocontrol of vector-borne disease.

Bio: Dylan Shropshire is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where he leads a research group studying mechanisms of Wolbachia-host interactions. He earned his PhD at Vanderbilt University as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow and completed an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Montana. He is also a first-generation high school graduate and former Pell Grant recipient, experiences that motivate his commitment to high-quality mentorship and evidence-based pedagogical practices. His work has been recognized by the Charles E. Kaufman New Investigator Award, Lehigh’s Pre-Tenure Faculty Award, and the College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence.

Hosted by: Professor Shelbi Russell, BME Department