05 Sep Telluride Science Town Talk: “New Drugs for Superbugs,” Innovation Center, 9/9!
This coming week the 2025 Telluride Science Town Talks series continues with a bonus talk – “New Drugs for Superbugs: Addressing the Antibiotic Resistance Crisis.” The event features Dr. Zemer Gitai of Princeton University and takes place Tuesday, September 9. Doors 6 p.m.; talk, 6:30 p.m. at the the Telluride Science & Innovation Center (old Depot).
Town Talks are FREE and open to the public.
Visit telluridescience.org to learn more about Telluride Science and the capital campaign to transform the historic Telluride Depot into the Telluride Science & Innovation Center. The venue is the permanent home for Telluride Science and a global hub of inspired knowledge exchange and development where great minds get to solve great challenges.
The 2025 Telluride Science Town Talks series is presented by Alpine Bank with additional support from the Telluride Mountain Village Owner’s Association.
Go here for more about Telluride Science.
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Superbugs include bacteria like MRSA, VRE, Carbapenem-Resistant Enterobacteriaceae (CRE), multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli, as well as drug-resistant Neisseria gonorrhoeae (a cause of gonorrhea) and drug-resistant Mycobacterium tuberculosis (which causes tuberculosis). There are also fungal superbugs, such as Candida auris, and parasite-based superbugs, like drug-resistant malaria.
Bottom line: those bad actors are big trouble should they get into our systems.
In March 2022, Princeton University proudly announced the receipt of funding that would be applied to advancing the discovery of novel anti-infectives to address antimicrobial resistance:
“Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest threats of our times. I am thrilled that ArrePath will help address this impending crisis by innovating the process of antibiotic drug discovery with novel technologies, insightful company leadership (President and CEO Lloyd Payne, DPhil, and Vice President, Technology and Data Science, Kurt Thorn, PhD,) and forward-looking investors,” said Zemer Gitai of the Gitai Lab at Princeton, continuing…
“We study the cell biology of bacteria, whose awesome experimental power allows us to attack questions with an integrated combination of genetics, biochemistry, microscopy, genomics, quantitative analysis, and computation. Our interdisciplary efforts are aided by our wonderful group of Princeton friends and collaborators…”
On Tuesday, September 9, Dr. Zerner will be discussing how far his research has come in a Telluride Science Town Talk titled “New Drugs for Superbugs: Addressing the Antibiotic Resistance Crisis.”
Zemer Gitai, more:
Dr. Zemer Gitai, courtesy Princeton University.
Zemer Gitai is the Edwin Grant Conklin Professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Princeton University. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree from MIT in 1996. After completing his graduate studies at UCSF in 2002, Dr. Gitai became a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Lucy Shapiro at Stanford University where he pioneered the study of the MreB actin-like cytoskeleton in Caulobacter crescentus.
Dr. Gitai joined the faculty of Princeton University as an Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology in 2005. He was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 2012 and to Professor in 2015. In 2016 he became the Edwin Grant Conklin Distinguished Professor of Biology. He was also the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Molecular Biology from 2012-2018.
Dr. Gitai’s research focuses on the cell biology of bacteria.
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