Contact Information

• mgrosser@unca.edu
• 255-7131
• 312 Zeis Hall

Courses Taught

• BIO 134: Experimental Design, Analysis, and Presentation
• BIO 136: Principles of Cellular and Molecular Biology
• BIO 339: Microbiology (lectures and labs)
• BIO 426: Molecular Biology (lectures and labs)
• BIO 480: Senior Seminar

Education

• Ph.D. Microbiology and Immunology, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
• B.S. Biology, University of Florida

About Me

I grew up in central Florida and graduated in 2011 from the University of Florida with a BS in Biology. After a summer internship studying Vibrio cholerae at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) in Lausanne prior to my senior year, I was captivated by microbiology and decided to pursue my Ph.D. in the field. My graduate work at UNC Chapel Hill focused on the genetic and metabolic responses of the bacterial pathogen Staphylococcus aureus to nitric oxide, an antimicrobial produced by the human immune system during bacterial infection. Following completion of my Ph.D. in 2016, I spent three years at the University of California Berkeley doing postdoctoral research on Pseudomonas aeruginosa pathogenesis during contact lens-associated corneal infections. During this time, I was also hired as an adjunct lecturer to teach summer sections of Microbiology at UC Berkeley, which is where I realized my love for teaching and getting undergraduate students hooked on microbiology. I was thrilled to join the Biology department at UNCA in 2019 to teach classes in my specialty and lead a team of undergraduate researchers to study bacterial pathogenesis in my own lab!

Outside of work, I love to spend time outdoors with my dog Tillie - some of our favorite activities include gardening, hiking, camping, fishing, and kayaking. I’m also an avid fiction reader and enjoy creating bacterial agar art related to the books I read, combining two of my favorite things! I post these creations, along with book reviews and “Bacteriophacts” related to the books’ themes, as @TheBookishBacteriologist on Instagram.

Research

Current Projects:

1. The majority of my current research is focused on nucleotide signaling molecules called second messengers in Staphylococcus aureus. We aim to understand their role in bacterial adaptation to stressors encountered during infection, including antimicrobials produced by the mammalian immune system and antibiotics. We use a variety of molecular genetics techniques, growth assays, and metabolic assays to answer these questions. 
2. Another arm of my research aims to create knockdown strains of essential genes in S. aureus to investigate their functions during bacterial growth and responses to stress. To accomplish this, we use a technique called CRISPR interference - a modified version of a CRISPR/Cas system that allows us to temporarily block expression of target genes, rather than editing the genome permanently. Students in my upper-level Molecular Biology course work to create these strains during labs, and research students in my lab continue the project with further phenotypic tests of these strains.
3. In Microbiology labs, we participate in the international program Tiny Earth, where undergraduate students isolate and characterize soil bacteria that produce antibiotics against pathogenic bacteria. In my research lab, students continue analyzing these soil isolates by mutagenizing them with transposons and performing screens to determine the genes responsible for antibiotic production. 

More info on our amazing team of undergraduate researchers and the work they are doing can be found on Instagram @GrosserLab. 

Publications

https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=BQJZjLoAAAAJ