The Anne S. Chatham Fellowship in Medicinal Botany

Cassandra L. Quave, Florida International University.  Her study includes the Anti-pathogenic activity of natural products from Italian medicinal plants against MRSA.  She plans to evaluate plants she has collected from ethnobotanical healers in Italy against multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureau, a pathogen that has become increasing difficult to control with existing antibiotics.  She is using an innovative approach, called quorum sensing, to study how these bacteria make film-like colonies that are difficult for traditional antibiotics to penetrate.