Assistant Professor
University of Pittsburgh
William DePas, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh. Will received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2014 in the laboratory of Dr. Matthew Chapman. While performing NIH pre-doctoral training in genetics, he investigated how environmental signals, particularly iron and oxidative stress, trigger uropathogenic Escherichia coli to form multicellular biofilms. After graduation, Will began his postdoctoral research with Dr. Dianne Newman at Caltech. In collaboration with Dr. Viviana Gradinaru's bioengineering laboratory, he helped develop a tissue clearing and bacterial visualization technique, MiPACT-HCR. As a Cystic Fibrosis (CF) Foundation postdoctoral fellow, Will utilized MiPACT-HCR to quantify the aggregation state, gene expression patterns, and growth rate of various bacterial pathogens in sputum from CF patients. In July of 2019, Will joined the Division of Infectious Diseases within the Pediatrics Department at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine as an assistant professor. He is currently working to assess the biogeography of nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) during infection of CF patients and to investigate the relationship between disease severity and the formation of biofilms in vivo. In parallel, his laboratory will work to elucidate the environmental factors that regulate when NTM switch between growth as free-living cells and biofilm communities.