 Our 10th and final presenter this afternoon is Suriya Agarwal, his title Intercepting Bacterial Communication to Limit Antibiotic Resistance. It has been predicted that by the year 2050, 300 million people will die due to antibiotic resistance. Antibiotic resistance is the ability of bacteria to survive, despite the presence of antibiotics. In just three decades, antibiotic resistance is projected to become deadlier than cancer and heart disease. In this doomsday scenario, a simple cut or infection that could have been easily treated would prove fatal. Welcome to another pre-antibiotic era. But how do we prevent the scenario? Bacteria live in highly complex communities called biophones. These can be thought of as being analogous to cities, as in they have walls and pipes. They organize, they resist, and they gossip. And just like communication is important for us humans to go about our daily lives, it's important for bacteria, too. With that communication, their cities would come crumbling down. So my goal was cut out. I needed to be able to understand this gossip and manipulate it in order to attack their cities. And I did just that. I've decrypted a new code that bacteria use to communicate with each other and exchange messages. It's actually a molecule that I've discovered. And through targeted genetic manipulation in the lab, I've been able to break this molecule and study two main bacterial behaviors. First, I studied the structure of these organized biophones by microscopy, why structure? Because a healthy structure is critical to bacteria's ability to colonize your throat, lungs, or middle ear. And it's also important to evade the activity of antibiotics. And I found that without this molecule of green circles, bacteria cannot form a healthy biofilm structure in red like it does in the presence of the molecule. You see sort of large holes and a collapsed structure. The second behavior I studied was bacterial sex, or DNA exchange amongst bacteria. Why sex? Because this is one of the ways they adapt over time and gain the ability to resist antibiotics. I found that this molecule relays a message that's critical for DNA exchange and adaptation. Thus, I found that this molecule is important for the formation of a healthy biofilm structure and for making cells adapt at transferring DNA that may make them antibiotic resistant. So what's the big deal? All my studies have been performed on a specific bacteria called pneumococcus, which has been termed as a serious antibiotic-resistant thread and is estimated to affect about 4 million individuals annually in the US. So by targeting this and other communication molecules, can we stop pneumococcal disease? Can we use this strategy to prevent and cure other bacterial diseases? And ultimately, can we avoid the impending antibiotic-resistant apocalypse that stares us in the eye? Thank you.