Faculty Profiles

Cyphert’s research interests lie at the intersection of polymer chemistry/drug delivery, microbiology, and the microbiome/bioinformatics. Her research group uses polymer chemistry and rational materials design principles to engineer responsive carriers for therapies to target microbiota communities. They develop novel therapies to address diseases at a range of distal tissues that are associated with microbiota composition (GI disorders, infectious diseases, cancer, bacterial vaginosis). They use cutting edge multi-omics (shotgun metagenomics, metabolomics, 16S rRNA sequencing) bioinformatic tools and anaerobic culturing to determine the therapeutic effect of novel materials and molecules on the microbiota.

Capsule Bio:

Cyphert earned her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2020 from Case Western Reserve University. For her graduate research, she was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP) and received the PhD Student Award for Outstanding Research from the Society for Biomaterials. During her graduate work she spent time as an international visiting researcher as a Fulbright Scholar at the Warsaw University of Technology (Poland) and Whitaker Foundation Grantee at Tokyo Women’s Medical University (Japan). Her graduate work focused on developing polymeric delivery systems for treatment of orthopaedic implant infection and cancer. Cyphert then joined the Sibley School of Mechanical Engineering at Cornell University as a postdoctoral fellow and was awarded an NIH Ruth L. Kirschstein Postdoctoral Individual National Research Service Award (NRSA F32) through the National Institute on Aging. The second half of her postdoctoral fellowship was spent in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at UC San Francisco. Her postdoctoral work focused on studying associations between the gut microbiome and musculoskeletal tissue health in the context of aging.