Research Team

Current Lab Members

Scott Thomas, Ph.D.

Assistant Research Scientist

Dr. Thomas received his B.S. in environmental microbiology from Northern Arizona University, where he specialized in the use of stable isotopes to elucidate microbial metabolism in soils. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in microbiology from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he studied the effects of temperature on microbial diversity and ecosystem function in geothermal springs. Dr. Thomas is currently the manager of the NYU College of Dentistry Microbiome and Sequencing Core. His current research ranges from the impact of specific inflammatory responses on bacterial isolates to integrating “omics” data toward illuminating mechanistic understandings of the human microbiome's role in health and disease.

Fangxi Xu, MS

Assistant Research Scientist

Fangxi received her B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Statistics from Stony Brook University and earned a master’s degree in Clinical Research at NYU before joined Dr. Saxena’s Lab. She is currently a Bioinformatics Analyst managing all the sequencing data in the lab. She is responsible for setting up, testing, and maintaining bioinformatics workflows, improving automated computational pipelines for analyzing 16S rRNA gene sequencing data, Shotgun Metagenomics sequencing data and supporting clinical data. She is also the research coordinator maintaining study databases and the progress of each clinical research projects, handling clinical sample collection and storage, and regular lab maintenance. Her research interest is to apply the bioinformatics skills of NGS analysis to investigate host-microbiome interactions in mouth and gut.

Kasturi Chandra, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Research Associate

Dr. Chandra received her B.S. in Microbiology from University of Calcutta and M.S. in Biotechnology from Pondicherry University (India). She earned her Ph.D. from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore (India) where she studied the crosstalk between bacterial metabolism, pathogenesis and host immune evasion. Kasturi joined Dr. Saxena’s lab in September 2022. Her current research focuses on studying the role of gut microbiome and their metabolites on pancreatic cancer progression.