Carolina Tropini

Dr. Carolina Tropini is an Assistant Professor at UBC in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology, and School of Biomedical Engineering. She is recognized as a Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator and, in 2020, became the first Canadian to receive the Johnson & Johnson Women in STEM2D Scholar award in Engineering. She’s the inaugural Alan Bernstein CIFAR Fellow in the Humans & the Microbiome Program and a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Scholar. In 2019, she was selected as a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar.
Her lab explores the impact of disrupted physical environments, like altered nutrition or intestinal diseases, on microbiota and hosts across multiple scales. This cross-disciplinary team integrates microbiology, bioengineering, and biophysics to study bacterial and microbial community functions, aiming to enhance human health.
Dr. Tropini completed her Ph.D. in Biophysics at Stanford University, where she combined computational and experimental methods to study bacterial mechanics and morphogenesis. As a postdoc in Dr. Justin Sonnenburg’s lab at Stanford, she focused on the effects of physical disruptions on gut-associated microbial communities, supported by a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award.