Dr. Aldridge’s laboratory works on developing drugs for tuberculosis which kills ~2 million people every year. The causative agent of tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, is thought to infect one-third of the world’s population, sickening ~10 million people a year. Despite efforts to simplify treatment strategies, tuberculosis still requires months of multi-drug therapy to cure. Her research focuses on designing optimized therapies for TB using cell biology and engineering approaches. Her lab is a multidisciplinary research team, integrating quantitative measurement with computational modeling and analysis to create intuitive descriptions of complex cell biology. For the Tufts Lyme Initiative, she has been working to utilize the approaches she has developed for treatment of tuberculosis on developing new drugs and identifying improved treatment regimens for Lyme disease.

Dr. Aldridge enjoys cooking and attending fife and drum performances in her spare time.