Leadership

Michael Lauzardo, MD, MSc, is an associate professor within the division of infectious diseases and global medicine. Also serving as the director of the CDC funded Southeastern National Tuberculosis Center (SNTC) at the University of Florida, he has been involved in public health, teaching and patient care within the College of Medicine since 1997. Trained as an internist and pulmonologist, throughout his career he has been involved in the clinical care of patients with tuberculosis. He has also played a key role with the Florida Department of Health, serving as the Deputy TB Controller for the Florida TB Program and is currently the director of the Florida TB Physicians Network. Previously, he was the chief of the division of infectious diseases and global medicine. His clinical practice and research centers around tuberculosis among at-risk populations and he is involved in various international health activities.

I am full professor of Experimental Pathology at the Department of Pathology, Inmunology and Laboratory Medicine of UF College of Medicine, and Holloway Chair for research in Chronic and Infectious Diseases. As a Marie-Curie Fellow, at the Rega Institute (Leuven, Belgium), and post-doctoral scientist with Walter M. Fitch, at the University of California, Irvine (USA), I have been trained in the field of molecular evolution of viruses and phylogenetic analysis. During the last fifteen years, as UF faculty, my research interests have included molecular epidemiology, intra-host viral evolution, and the application of phylogenetic and population genetic methods to the study of human and simian pathogenic viruses (in particular HIV/SIV, HCV, HTLV and influenza). More recently, I have been applying the Bayesian coalescent framework to study molecular evolution and phylogeography of emergent and re-emergent bacterial pathogens, such as MRSA, Shigella, and Vibrio cholerae, using genome-wide SNPs. In addition, my laboratory has developed ad hoc protocols for the generation of high-throughput sequence data (including DNA sequencing, transcriptomics, and miRNA expression profiles) and droplet digital PCR quantitative analyses of viral and bacterial pathogens, as well as several automated bioinformatic and machine learning pipelines for the analysis of large sequence data sets (big data). Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, my group has been tracking the emergence and spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants in Florida, and we are currently running a coronavirus genomic surveillance program sequencing hundreds of samples per week from infected patients in Florida and the Caribbean area.