Brian Haugen

Brian is a sixth-year MDTP graduate student working on aspects of pathogenesis by Uropathogenic Escherichia coli (UPEC). Primarily, Brian is interested in the in vivo expression differences between the wild-type and the hyper-colonizing dsdA strains of our model UPEC, CFT073. He is exploiting a technique developed in collaboration with the Mobley lab in which bacteria-laden urine is collected from mice infected with a single strain of E. coli. Bacterial RNA is subsequently isolated from these urine samples, and then reverse-transcribed to a population of labeled cDNAs that can be analyzed using microarrays. Brian has determined key differences between in vivo expression profiles of the wild-type and dsdA strains, and has identified several genes which contribute to the hyper-colonization phenotype of the dsdA strain.

Brian came to the University of Wisconsin-Madison from Bemidji State University in Northern Minnesota where he was a biology major. He performed undergraduate research with Dr. Patrick Guilfoile (also a UW-Madison Ph.D.), which focused on the identification of an immunoglobulin binding protein from the deer tick, Ixodes scapularis. Though he was unsuccessful in identifying such a protein from female ticks, later work from the lab eventually uncovered this type of protein expressed in male ticks. During his time at BSU, Brian also gained experience in supporting Apple hardware and software in a print and web design environment as a systems administrator for the BSU News & Publications department.

Before attending BSU, Brian was born and raised even further north in Minnesota near a town of 212 named Grygla. Today, he enjoys life on the north side of Madison, WI with his wife and their son. When not in the lab, he enjoys learning about technology, programming, and Apple hardware and Mac OS X scientific software.