biofilmmaker | assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon | opportunistic pathogens in built environment & infection
Pittsburgh, PA
Joined November 2010
- Tweets3.9K
- Following597
- Followers1.4K
- Likes18.5K
Pinned Tweet
The Armbruster Lab is officially open in the Department of Biological Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh! We're studying how bacteria in biofilms persist in the built environment & transition into the host to cause infections. Happy to be here! 🤓
From lab scripts to a reproducible pipeline! 💻
Check out this article about @CmuScience Quantitative Bio & Bioinformatics MS grad from my lab, Katie Wang.
FYI - Katie is on the job market in bioinformatics & software development. Happy to connect you! cmu.edu/mcs/news-events/2026…
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
... and discuss the possibility that natural selection operates on populations of microorganisms to alter the expression of traits that affect emergent functions within microbial communities.
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Happy to announce that a new opinion paper of our group just came out @ Current Opinion in Microbiology :
A conceptual framework to dissect emergent functions in microbial communities
with Swagatika Dash @sharvari_harshe @anjanaprasad06 @_Shubharthi_
sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Very cool work from Gürol Süel's lab:
Self-generated hydrogel ejects bacterial cells for localized biofilm dispersion
nature.com/articles/s41564-0…
Check out this @seattletimes article where @MattParsek & I give a microbiologist's perspective on cleaning your home! Brb, scrubbing my sink... 🫧 seattletimes.com/explore/at-…
Gearing up for my first visit to @ASMicrobiology conference since 2011 in New Orleans, when it was called the General Meeting! I’m participating in a panel called: “Poster to Paper — Ask the Experts” on Sunday, June 7 from 11:15am–12:00pm ET. See you in DC! 🫡 #asm2026
Thank you to the Allegheny Branch of ASM for a Peggy Cotter Travel Award to attend #asm2026 in DC! 🙏 Postdocs and early career faculty, check it out via your local ASM Branch: asm.org/travel-award/peggy-c…
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Student-Driven Microbiome Exploration: A Low-Cost 16S rRNA Sequencing Curriculum for Undergraduate Biology Education biorxiv.org/content/10.64898…
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Since its first isolation in 1935, several thousand Clostridioides difficile isolates have been collected & analyzed. In #ClinMicroRev: an overview of the current C. difficile population structure, including a summary of the 5 main clades. Read now: asm.social/2TC
ALT GrapeTree phylogenies of the Enterobase Clostridioides strains. Each phylogeny was generated using all strains present within Enterobase (accessed 25June 2025) and the “Create MLST GrapeTree” function with the MSTree V2 algorithm.
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Bacteria covalently incorporate polyfluoroalkyl carboxylates into membrane lipids dlvr.it/TRks5j #MicroSky
Congrats to Anish Pyne (@ani_mrprfct) for winning the People’s Choice Award in tonight’s 3 Minute Thesis competition @CarnegieMellon 🥳🥳🥳 @CMU_Bio
My lab went outside! Check out this article (and video!) about a new project in my lab @CmuScience cmu.edu/mcs/news-events/2026…
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
🎉Congratulations to #mBio Editors Jorge Vidal (@JorgeEVidal1), Jacob Yount (@YountLabOSU), and Birgit Scharf (of @VT_Biology) and Senior Editor Tom Coenye (of @LPM_UGent) on their election to the American Academy of Microbiology! 👏 asm.social/2OC
We call it Greenfield to confuse the Vikings. #pittsburgh – at Pittsburgh, PA
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Emerging advances in prokaryotic transposition: TnPedia as a promising tool dlvr.it/TQSjqk
Congrats to Erin and Betsy for passing their qualifying exams last week!!!! Officially 3 PhD candidates in the lab @CarnegieMellon now! 😎
Congrats to Sean, Will, and co-authors! Shoutout to
@CmuScience Quantitative Biology & Bioinformatics (QBB) MS student Isabelle D'Amico from my lab for her creative work on this cool collaboration! sciencedirect.com/science/ar…
Catherine Armbruster retweeted
Very cool paper by Jyotsna Kalathera et al. from @iamsamayp's-lab on
Bottleneck size drives the evolution of
cooperative traits in an aggregative multicellular
myxobacterium
just out @plosbiology
Congratulations to all coauthors.
journals.plos.org/plosbiolog…
Our last two guest lectures in Ecology @CmuScience were part of our theme thinking of infection as an ecologist (human = environment). First, Dr. Yasmin Hilliam (Bomberger Lab at @GeiselMed) discussed how respiratory viruses change nutrients in airways, impacting microbiomes.
In the same theme, TAs Betsy and Erin (PhD students in my lab) presented on thinking of migration of bacteria between upper & lower respiratory tract through the lens of island biogeography. Heavily inspired by this awesome paper & others pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2470…
