ASCI / Young Physician-Scientist Awards, 2020
The Young Physician-Scientist Awards (YPSA) recognize physician-scientists who are early in their first faculty appointment and have made notable achievements in their research.
About the awardee
Dr. Dekker received his MD from Harvard Medical School and PhD from Harvard University through the NIH Medical Scientist Training Program. He completed Pathology residency and fellowship training in Medical Microbiology at Massachusetts General Hospital and is board-certified in both through the American Board of Pathology. In 2013, he joined the NIH Clinical Center as a senior staff member of the Microbiology Service in the Department of Laboratory Medicine. In this role, he co-directed the Bacteriology, Specimen Processing, Parasitology, and Molecular Epidemiology sections of the clinical laboratory before serving as acting chief of the Microbiology Service in 2018. In 2018, Dr. Dekker was named as a Lasker Clinical Research Scholar and recruited as a tenure-track investigator within the NIAID intramural research program, where he established the Bacterial Pathogenesis and Antimicrobial Resistance Unit within the Laboratory for Clinical Immunology and Microbiology.
Dr. Dekker is an Editor for the Journal of Clinical Microbiology and has served on FDA Anti-Infective Drug Advisory Committees. In 2016, Dr. Dekker received the Beckman-Coulter Young Investigator award from the American Society for Microbiology, and he received an NIH Clinical Center CEO Award in 2017 for developing diagnostic methods using next-generation sequencing.
One of the main areas of focus within Dr. Dekker’s research laboratory is the application of genomic techniques to understand the evolutionary mechanisms by which bacterial antibiotic resistance emerges. Another important area of focus within the lab is the study of bacterial pathoadaptation in the natural contexts of acute and chronic infection. Population genomics approaches are applied in combination with in vitro adaptive evolution experiments to understand selection dynamics and host-pathogen interactions in the context of defined genetic immunodeficiency diseases.