Dr. Mehmet A. Orman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He received his Ph.D. in Chemical and Biochemical Engineering from Rutgers University, where his doctoral research focused on systems-level and computational analyses of metabolic regulation in the liver under stress conditions, including burn injury and infection. Following his Ph.D., Dr. Orman completed postdoctoral training at Princeton University, where he studied the metabolic mechanisms underlying bacterial persistence and antibiotic tolerance, and at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he investigated DNA repair pathways in cancer cells. He subsequently began his academic career in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of Houston, where he established an externally funded research program and was promoted to Associate Professor, before transferring his laboratory to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where his group continues to investigate drug-tolerant persister phenotypes across bacterial and cancer systems. Dr. Orman’s work has been supported by major federal awards, including an NSF CAREER Award, an NIH NIAID Career Transition Award (K22), and multiple NIH R01 grants. He has also been recognized for excellence in teaching at the Cullen College of Engineering at the University of Houston.
Dr. Orman’s research integrates quantitative experiments, single-cell approaches, and computational modeling to uncover the mechanisms driving drug tolerance, persistence, and recovery in both bacterial and cancer systems.