Dr. Peterson has nearly 25 years of experience as a molecular microbiologist and has studied the oral and gut microbiome in a variety of health and disease contexts over the past four years. Dr. Peterson applied functional genomic analyses, particularly related to transcriptomics and data analysis to study microbial infectious disease agents.
Scott has a BSC in biology from Ruters University, and gained his PhD from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Peterson also served as the Scientific Director of the NIAID’s Pathogen Functional Genomics Resource Center for 10 years. He has conducted nearly 30 collaborative projects with scientists world-wide in the area of infectious diseases resulting in 48 publications in peer reviewed journals, including Cell. The publications included efforts focused on 18 infectious agents and microbial species, 21 on gene expression using DNA microarrays and/or qPCR, 12 on proteomic profiling, 13 using high throughput DNA sequencing methods, 3 using comparative genome hybridization and 3 related to high throughput recombinant protein production.
Recent and ongoing collaborations in microbiome research projects are focused on dental caries onset and progression in collaboration with Dr. Bretz at NYU, the antibiotic induced obesity in mice in collaboration with Dr. Martin Blaser at NYU, the tumor associated microbiome of human subjects with colorectal cancer in collaboration with Dr. Cynthia Sears at John Hopkins University, Sonia Ramaworthy (UCSD) and Manuel Perucho (SMBRI).
Together with SBMRI colleagues Dr. Peterson is engaged in microbiota analyses of human and mouse samples related to IBD, CRC, immunosenescence and inflammaging in the elderly (Baaten, B), the TNF/lymphotoxin/LIGHT network and its control on microbiota composition (Ware C), Mannose induced lean-phenotype and pro- and prebiotic screening and testing. Dr. Peterson is interested in the development of probiotics that target disease caused by diet and dysbiotic microbiota.
