Dr. John C. Alverdy is the Sarah and Harold Lincoln Thompson Professor and Executive Vice- Chair of the Department of Surgery at the University of Chicago. He is a clinical gastrointestinal surgeon with an active practice that treats patients with complex digestive-related disorders. He has run a continuously funded NIH-funded laboratory that studies the molecular interactions of bacteria and the intesitnal mucosa in order to understand how life-threatening infections arise after trauma and major surgery and during critical illness. He has developed several anti-infective polymer-based compounds that can attenuate the virulence of several multi-drug resistant pathogens that cause life threatening infections in surgical patients and works with the IME to synthesize, refine, and scale the compounds for pre-clinical testing.