Carrie Cowardin
University of Virginia, VA·Microbiology & Immunology
Rotavirus is the leading infectious cause of diarrheal deaths in young children, and an oral vaccine exists. Yet the vaccine works least well in exactly the children who need it most: undernourished infants in low-income settings.
- Fields
Microbiology & Immunology
Public Health & Epidemiology
Medicine & Clinical Research
- Topics
oral rotavirus vaccine
environmental enteric dysfunction
gut microbiome
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Mar 2028
What they work on
- Test whether gut microbiota from stunted human infants drive dysregulated intestinal immunity, using germ-free mice colonized with stunted or healthy infant microbiota whose pups are weaned onto a nutrient-deficient diet.
- Measure cellular and antibody responses to oral rotavirus vaccination in these intergenerational mice and determine whether vaccinated animals are protected against subsequent rotavirus challenge.
- Identify which bacterial taxa are implicated in immune dysregulation by sorting immunoglobulin A-bound gut microbes from the mice and sequencing them.
- Characterize the mucosal immune changes linked to poor vaccine responses, including microbiota-directed IgA, small intestinal IgA-producing plasma cells and Rorgt-positive regulatory T cells that damp immune responses.
More about the research
Diet alone does not explain the gap, since nutrient-poor food by itself does not weaken the vaccine in mice. Human studies instead point to the community of microbes living in the gut. This project asks whether specific gut bacteria carried by undernourished children actively skew the developing intestinal immune system in ways that blunt oral vaccine responses.
Why it matters
Oral rotavirus vaccination saves lives but underperforms in undernourished children, who face the highest risk of dying from diarrhea. By testing whether particular gut microbes cause the immune changes that weaken vaccine responses, this work could identify microbial targets to add, remove or modify so that existing oral vaccines protect better, with the eventual aim of reducing childhood deaths from diarrheal disease.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Meng Wu
Washington University in St Louis, MO·Microbiology & Immunology·Early-career
Identify the gut stromal cell populations that fail to produce the immune signals needed for B-cell development and antibody production, using germ-free mice colonized with gut microbes from human donors who responded poorly to oral cholera vaccine.
June Louise Round
University of Utah, UT·Microbiology & Immunology
Catalog which commensal viruses in stool from healthy humans are bound by mucosal IgA and IgG antibodies, by purifying and sorting antibody-coated DNA and RNA viral particles.
Matthew Olm
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Microbiology & Immunology
Identify ecological forces linked to diverging infant microbiomes through multi-omics profiling of global infant groups. Measure breast milk sugars (HMOs), diet, maternal IgA antibody binding, keystone microbes, and whether microbes come from the mother.
The school
University of Virginia: 43 labs on PI Pages, $814M a year on research, 413 research doctorates a year.
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