Mohammed Dwidar is an Assistant Professor of Molecular Medicine in Cleveland Clinic College of Medicine of Case Western Reserve University. He is also Director of the Microbial Culturing and Engineering facility of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Microbiome & Human Health.
His areas of expertise is broadly related to Microbiology, but specifically, to Bacterial Synthetic Biology. He started work in the Microbiology field, and more specifically Bacteriology, 14 years ago as Quality control Microbiologist in a pharmaceutical company in Egypt. He then moved to South Korea to start his MSc course work, during which focused on isolating and studying obligate anaerobic bacteria and mainly clostridia strains for butyric acid and butanol production. For his PhD, Dr. Dwidar shifted toward medical and environmental Microbiology studies and focused his thesis research on the study of predatory bacteria and their capabilities to eradicate pathogenic bacteria and their biofilms, with eye toward using them in the future as living antibiotics against multi-drug resistant infections.
Dr. Dwidar's postdoctoral training focused on Microbial Synthetic Biology, and more specifically, engineering microbes through RNA aptamers and synthetic riboswitches to respond to user specified stimuli or disease cues in a controlled defined manner. He has thus had long and diverse experience in different areas of Microbiology, resulting in 19 original peer-reviewed research articles during the last 8 years, of which he was the first-author (or co-first author) on 18 articles among them, plus several patents, review articles and one book chapter. These publications in turn covered a wide range of topics from biofuels production and anaerobic fermentations during my MSc course work and research, to predatory bacteria, their hydrolytic enzymes and biofilms during my PhD. Another major area of interest has included Bacterial Synthetic Biology, which was a major part of my postdoctoral research experience. He thus has solid Microbiology experience.
In Dr. Dwidar's current position as the Director of the Microbial Culturing and Engineering facility at Cleveland Clinic, he has further expanded his expertise and tools for aiding investigators to perform studies utilizing advanced molecular technologies to study the involvement of specific microbial genes in biochemical pathways and effects on hosts. Ongoing studies include genetic engineering of numerous human commensals to have defined gain or loss of functions, the design of synthetic polymicrobial communities that have defined functional capacities, or lack of specific biological pathways for use in more complex microbial culture or transplantation studies, and the generation of microbial tools for investigation of processes of interest in eukaryotic hosts.