Email

isabel.fernandezescapa@bcm.edu

Positions

Senior Staff Scientist

Molecular Virology and Microbiology
KLemon Lab
Baylor College of Medicine
Houston, Texas United States

Education

PhD from Universidad Complutense de Madrid

05/2012 - Madrid, Madrid Spain

BSc from Universidad de León

06/2006 - León, León Spain

Postdoctoral Training at The Forsyth Institute

12/2017 - Cambridge, Massachusetts United States

Professional Interests

• Human Nasal Microbiome
• Microbe-Microbe Interactions
• Bioinformatics

Professional Statement

As a Senior Staff Scientist in the K Lemon Lab, my main goal is to understand the metabolic networks underlying microbial physiology and ecology in human nasal microbial communities. I am formally trained as a microbiologist with an interdisciplinary portfolio of knowledge on the bacterial physiology and microbial composition of human nasal microbiota. This includes extensive wet lab experience in bacterial genetics and microbial physiology combined with expertise in high-throughput technologies and computational microbiome data analysis. I believe integrity, transparency and reproducibility are essential in scientific research and I have a passion for adapting, improving and developing open-access tools and resources for researchers studying microbial communities.

Websites

Videos

Selected Publications

• Isabel F. Escapa, Yanmei Huang, Tsute Chen, Maoxuan Lin, Alexis Kokaras, Floyd E Dewhirst, Katherine P Lemon "Construction of habitat-specific training sets to achieve species-level assignment in 16S rRNA gene datasets." Microbiome. 2020 May 15; 8 (1): 1-16. Pubmed PMID: 32414415
• Isabel F. Escapa, Tsute Chen, Yanmei Huang, Prasad Gajare, Floyd E. Dewhirst, Katherine P. Lemon "New Insights into Human Nostril Microbiome from the Expanded Human Oral Microbiome Database (eHOMD): a Resource for the Microbiome of the Human Aerodigestive Tract." mSystems. 2018 December 4; 3 (6): e00187-18. Pubmed PMID: 30534599
• Brugger SD, Eslami SM, Pettigrew MM, Escapa IF, Henke MT, Kong Y, Lemon KP. "Dolosigranulum pigrum Cooperation and Competition in Human Nasal Microbiota." mSphere. 2020 September 9; 5 (5): e00852-20. Pubmed PMID: 32907957