Dr. Luke Harrison
Assistant Professor, Division of Infectious Diseases
Dr. Harrison’s research program investigates the evolution and pathobiology of mycobacteria, integrating comparative genomics and metagenomics to study Mycobacterium tuberculosis and non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections. His current projects focus on elucidating the genomic dynamics of non-tuberculous mycobacterial infections through direct metagenomic sequencing and on developing computational tools for comparative genomic analysis within the M. tuberculosis complex. His overarching goal is to link microbial evolution with clinical outcomes to improve the diagnosis and understanding of mycobacterial disease.
1. Development and validation of a gene-level, reference-based pangenomic pipeline for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex
2. In silico benchmarking of species-level metagenomic classification algorithms for the detection of Mycobacterium spp. in long-read sequencing datasets
3. Evaluation of host depletion strategies on the yield of Mycobacterium spp. sequencing reads for Oxford Nanopore metagenomic sequencing of human sputum samples.