Fabrizio Spagnolo

Description

Dr. Spagnolo joined the faculty at Long Island University in the Fall of 2021. Besides directing his own research lab, he currently serves as the Director of the Computational Biology Lab and, since 2022, as the Director of Introductory Biology at LIU Post.

After completing his doctoral studies under Daniel Dykhuizen at Stony Brook University, Dr. Spagnolo was appointed a Postdoctoral Fellow at the New York University School of Medicine (now the NYU Grossman School of Medicine), where he completed a project on the genomics of community-acquired Staphylococcus aureus infections in patients. In 2016, Dr. Spagnolo was named a Frontiers of Science Fellow at Columbia University, where he studied how pathogens can live long-term in healthcare environments, while also teaching the process of science to Columbia students. Dr. Spagnolo was then part of a team that was awarded an NIH grant to study novel phage-based treatments for biofilm associated bacteria at CUNY Queens College.

When the COVID19 global pandemic erupted, the entire lab shifted focus to help by developing new ways to monitor SARS-CoV-2 levels in wastewater. The system developed by the team at CUNY Queens College is still used by NYC agencies to screen wastewater for different pathogens. Dr. Spagnolo also headed a team to investigate how airborne viruses, such as SARS-CoV-2, spread in classroom environments, for which they were awarded an RAPID grant from the National Science Foundation.

Prior to his graduate work, Dr. Spagnolo studied philosophy at Boston University.

Research

• The Ecology & Evolution of Microbes

Research in the Spagnolo Lab focuses on the evolution and maintenance of antibiotic resistance in bacterial populations. Antibiotic resistance has reached crisis levels: over 2.8 million infections and 38,000 deaths are directly attributable to antibiotic resistance each year in the United States. Projections are that resistance to antimicrobials will cause the deaths of more than 10 million people annually by 2050, which would make it the greatest killer of humankind on the planet, surpassing even cancer. Our research focuses on how resistance evolves, how it is maintained, and how we can use biotechnology to control it. Current projects in the lab include using experimental evolution to develop novel phage therapy treatments for some of the most stubborn antibiotic resistant infections, such as those that grow in biofilms. Biofilms are communities of bacteria that live together in an extracellular matrix that they themselves produce and are how most bacteria live in nature. Other projects focus on the ecology and evolution of the SARS-2-CoV virus and how to control viral transmission in built environments such as school and healthcare environments.

Distinctions & Awards

Columbia University:

• Frontiers of Science Fellowship, 2016-2021

Stony Brook University:

• Lawrence B. Slobodkin Fellowship for Graduate Education and Research, 2014
• George C. Williams Fellowship for Research in Evolutionary Biology, 2013

Selected Publications

• “Risk of Infection Due to Airborne Virus in Classroom Environments Lacking Mechanical Ventilation,” PLoS ONE 19(11): e0314002, 2024. (with A. Goldblatt, et. al.)
• “Bacteriophage Therapy for the Treatment of Mycobacterium tuberculosis Infections in Humanized Mice,” Communications Biology, 7, 294, 2024. (with F. Yang, et. al.)
• “Humidity Reduces Rapid and Distant Airborne Dispersal of Viable Viral Particles in Classroom Settings,” Environmental Science & Technology Letters, 10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00243, 2022. (with A. Skanata, et. al.)
• “Tracking Cryptic SARS-CoV-2 Lineages Detected in NYC Wastewater,” Nature Communications, 13, 635, 2022. (with D.S. Smyth, et. al.)
• “Why Do Antibiotics Exist?” mBio 12(6):e01966-2, 2021 (with J.J. Dennehy & M. Trujillo)
• “Pathogen Population Structure Can Explain Hospital Outbreaks,” The ISME Journal 12(12): 2835–2843, 2018 (with P. Cristofari, et. al.)

Frequently-Cited Papers

• “The Evolution of Resistance to Continuously Increasing Streptomycin Concentrations in Populations of E. coli,” Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy 60:1336–1342, 2016 (with D.E. Dykhuizen, et. al.)
• “A review of the causes of warm–edge range limits: proximate factors and implications for climate change,” Journal of Biogeography 41:429–442, 2014 (with A.E. Cahill, et. al.)
• “How Does Climate Change Cause Extinction?” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 280(1750): 20121890, 2013 (with A.E. Cahill, et. al.)