Dr. Marcel Behr - Looking for the North Star. Repositioning our studies of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex

Marcel Behr

McGill University, Montreal, Canada

Looking for the North Star. Repositioning our studies of the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex

Dr. Marcel Behr is a clinician-scientist, Professor of Medicine, McGill University. He was the founding Director of the McGill International TB Centre and is now Director of the McGill Infectious Diseases Division and the McGill Interdisciplinary Initiative in Infection and Immunity (McGill-i4).
Dr. Behr trained at the University of Toronto, Queen’s, McGill and Stanford. Dr. Behr’s lab uses bacterial genomic methodologies to study the epidemiology and pathogenesis of tuberculosis (TB) and other mycobacterial diseases. This work has helped clarify the natural history of TB, determine the basis of attenuation of the BCG vaccine, identify differences between closely related mycobacterial species and strains, and understand the innate immune response to the mycobacterial cell wall. Dr. Behr’s work has been recognized by election into the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, the American Society for Clinical Investigation and the American Academy of Microbiology.

Selected references

• Reconsidering Mycobacterium bovis as a proxy for zoonotic tuberculosis: a molecular epidemiological surveillance study. Duffy SC, Srinivasan S, Schilling MA, Stuber T, Danchuk SN, Michael JS, Venkatesan M, Bansal N, Maan S, Jindal N, Chaudhary D, Dandapat P, Katani R, Chothe S, Veerasami M, Robbe-Austerman S, Juleff N, Kapur V, Behr MA. Lancet Microbe. 2020 Jun;1(2):e66-e73. doi: 10.1016/S2666-5247(20)30038-0
• An imputed ancestral reference genome for the Mycobacterium tuberculosis complex better captures structural genomic diversity for reference-based alignment workflows. Harrison LB, Kapur V, Behr MA BiorXiv doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.09.07.556366