Steve Kazemi
Steve brings 20-years of manufacturing and operations management experience to the team. Steve founded Pure Cultures because he believes in the “wonder bugs” or probiotics and the benefits they bring to our society. Steve is often called upon as a consultant for struggling companies with their quality systems.
Brian Oakley
I am a microbial ecologist interested in tackling important problems at the interface of basic and applied research. The revolution in high-throughput DNA sequencing has conclusively demonstrated the importance of microbial communities for life on earth. Microbial ecology cuts across many fields and I have applied the tools and techniques of microbial ecology to disciplines ranging from oceanography to human and animal health. My graduate training combined classical and microbial ecology but I only considered myself a microbiologist after working in the Microbiology Department of the University of Washington, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and the University of Warwick. Four years as a research microbiologist with the USDA Agricultural Research Service gave me first-hand knowledge of the poultry industry and a chance to apply the tools and techniques of microbial ecology to veterinary microbiology. Most of the current focus of my research is on the poultry microbiome and its relationships to food safety, infectious disease, and poultry nutrition. Our standard toolkit combines field work with classical microbiology, microscopy, quantitative PCR, high-throughput 16S rRNA sequencing, metagenomics, and associated bioinformatics. We are currently funded through several intramural mechanisms, extramural grants, and industry partnerships.
Jiangcho Zhao
My lab focuses on the roles that human and animal microbiome play in health and different diseases. We use interdisciplinary approaches such as multi-omics (e.g. metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, metabolomics), bioinformatics, statistics, big data and mixed culture to, for example:
Characterize and engineer gastrointestinal microbiome to promote human healthy aging, increase animal nutrient utilization and efficiency, production and well-being;
Identify and apply prebiotics and probiotics to increase human and animal health and reduce antibiotics use;
Study the ecology and evolution of human and animal microbiome;
Identify airway microbiome biomarkers in human and animal respiratory diseases such as cystic fibrosis, COPD and Bovine Respiratory Disease for early and targeted therapy.
Rainer Simmering
Dr. Rainer Simmering is a Senior Scientist in the Corporate Microbiology group of Henkel AG & Co. KGaA in Düsseldorf. After finalizing his study of biology at the WWU in Muenster, he conducted a PhD at the German Institute of Human Nutrition in Potsdam, where he also stayed for another year as a Post-Doc.
In October 2000, he started at the Nestlé Research Center in Lausanne, where he was working on the detection and function of the intestinal microbiota.
In 2003 he came to Henkel, where he worked, in the group of Hygiene Research, on different research projects, like the elucidation of the skin microbiota with molecular means. Since mid of 2009 Dr. Simmering acts as an internal consultant for the global Beauty Care business regarding all microbiological questions.
