Kendall Dabaghi

Papers

Total Citations

244

H-Index

About

Kendall Dabaghi is a trailblazer at the intersection of microbiology, automation, and artificial intelligence, whose work is redefining how we study the human microbiome. Her primary research focuses on developing high-throughput culturomics platforms that integrate machine learning to isolate and characterize pure bacterial cultures from complex microbial ecosystems—a feat that has long been a bottleneck in microbiome science. Her landmark 2023 paper, "High-throughput microbial culturomics using automation and machine learning," has already amassed over 244 citations, underscoring its transformative impact on the field. By combining robotic liquid handling with predictive algorithms, Dabaghi’s approach dramatically accelerates the isolation of individual bacterial strains while preserving essential phenotype-genotype links, enabling researchers to move beyond sequencing-based surveys toward mechanistic, experimental studies. This work not only addresses a critical scalability challenge but also opens new avenues for discovering novel microbes with therapeutic potential. Dabaghi’s contributions are widely recognized as foundational for the next generation of microbiome engineering, positioning her as a leading voice in the push to make culturomics as routine and powerful as metagenomics.