Tami Lieberman

Tami Lieberman is an Associate Professor at MIT with dual appointments in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. She earned her B.A. in Molecular Biology and Genetics from Northwestern University, her Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Harvard University, and completed postdoctoral training in Eric Alm’s lab at MIT before joining the faculty in January 2018. NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, which supports unusually innovative research from early career investigators.

Professor Lieberman’s lab studies microbial evolution in real time, with a focus on mutations occurring within individual human microbiomes. Her lab seeks to understand how individual bacterial species and strains behave in the human microbiome, including the selective pressures they face and their survival strategies. The Lieberman Lab uses human skin as a primary model ecosystem and leverages evolutionary inference to build principles for precisely engineering microbiomes. Her work has important implications for developing personalized microbiome therapies and next-generation probiotics.