Deborah Hogan Appointed to the Thomas S. Kosasa Professorship

Established in 2016, the endowed professorship honors a Geisel faculty member with distinguished records in both teaching and research and whose work is noteworthy for its contribution to the fields of physiology, neurobiology, microbiology, immunology, or any successor disciplines as these fields of inquiry evolve.

"I am incredibly honored by the recognition that comes with being appointed to the Thomas D. Kosasa Professorship. At Dartmouth, I have had the privilege of working with amazing lab members, including graduate students, post docs, technicians and undergrads, exceptional faculty colleagues, and phenomenal scientific and administrative staff," Hogan says. "I am appreciative of what we have been able to accomplish in terms of understanding pathogen behavior in chronic infections. We will use the support of the Kosasa Professorship to push forward our search for new and innovative ways to understand and ultimately manipulate the behaviors of microbes in both health and disease."

Since joining the faculty in 2004, Hogan's research has focused on understanding how microbes integrate chemical and nutritional signals to interact with microbes as well as with human cells. The Hogan Lab has become a recognized leader in the study microbial process relevant to chronic infections including interactions between co-infecting species, pathogen evolution, and physiological adaptations to the lung infection environment.

"Dr. Hogan embodies all of the academic qualities identified by the Kosasa Professorship. She's an accomplished teacher in the classroom and an outstanding mentor in her research laboratory where she has mentored undergraduate students, MD students, postdoctoral fellows, and guided 18 graduate students to completion of their PhD degree," says Geisel dean Duane Compton, PhD. "She has established a national reputation for her scholarly work in understanding the mechanisms supporting polymicrobial interactions and their contributions to disease."

Hogan is the director of the Microbiology and Molecular Pathogenesis Training Program, is the associate director of the BioMT COBRE, and co-directs the DartCF Translational Research Cores at Dartmouth. She serves as an editor for mBio, an associate editor for PLOS Pathogens, and is a member of several editorial boards. She has participated in the organization of multiple international meetings and directed the Molecular Mycology Summer Course at the Marine Biological Labs in Woods Hole for five years. Hogan received the Dartmouth Graduate Faculty Mentoring Award in 2014, the Dr. Thomas Maciag COBRE Independence Award from the National Institutes of Health in 2016, and became a Fellow of American Academy of Microbiology in 2019.

She has published more than 100 research papers and her work has led to fruitful funded collaborations with experts in computational biology, genomics, biophysical chemistry, and clinical and translational science and has received more than $10 million in grant funding over the past 15 years.