Maxwell De Jong

Research

My PhD has been focused on quantitatively understanding how antibiotic resistance emerges and evolves in complex microbial environments. Despite the great societal importance of combating antibiotic resistance, our understanding is incomplete in many important ways. My work specifically has focused on understanding how heterogeneity in various forms impacts the evolutionary dynamics of antibiotic resistance using a combination of mathematical modeling inspired from statistical physics and high performance computing. In addition to developing new theoretical models, I have also collaborated with experimental biophysicists to design experiments to test several of the model predictions and used Bayesian methods to analyze the resulting data.



Tuning Spatial Profiles of Selection Pressure to Modulate the Evolution of Drug Resistance

 Understanding microbial antibiotic resistance is a daunting task, as bacteria grow in complex environments with a myriad of different environmental parameters that can affect their growth rate, such as pH, temperature, density, drug distribution, and nutrient distribution, just to name a few. In many laboratory experiments of bacteria, many of these factors are carefully controlled for to allow scientists to isolate the effects of the quantities of interest. However, can spatial variation in these often-neglected quantities impact the emergence of antibiotic resistance?