Nicole Kirchoff, PhD

Dr. Nicole Kirchoff received her PhD in Microbiology at Oregon State University. Dr. Kirchoff is a microbial ecologist who has studied how the gut microbiome is related to the health and fitness of the vertebrate host. She has characterized the gut microbiome of many vertebrates including fish, dogs, mice, and humans. While she does have microbiome wet lab experience, she primarily uses bioinformatics and nonparametric statistics to compare gut microbial composition across samples. She has experience in taxonomic and functional annotation of the gut microbiome. Her most recent work compared bacterial taxonomy and antimicrobial resistance gene profiles between healthy patients and patients with C. difficile infection.

Dr. Nicole Kirchoff will provide support to the VMIC community on microbiome study design & microbiome data analysis. She is currently hosting office hours Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10am to noon to answer any microbiome related questions. Here you can discuss hypotheses, study design, analysis, feasibility, etc. of your microbiome studies. You must schedule an appointment ahead of time to meet with Dr. Kirchoff using this link: https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/MicrobiomeOfficeHours@vumc.org/bookings/

Do you have a Microbiome project, but you don’t know where to start with analyzing your data? Stay tuned for upcoming opportunities to have Dr. Kirchoff’s support for microbiome data analysis (e.g., 16S rRNA sequencing, metagenomics, metatranscriptomics) for projects from the VU and VUMC community!