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George O’Toole, Ph.D., is a professor at Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with Jorge Escalante-Semerena, Ph.D., and performed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School as a Damon-Runyon and a Hood Fellow with Roberto Kolter, Ph.D. His honors include the NSF Career Award, Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences, election as a fellow of AAAS and American Academy of °®¶¹´«Ã½ and serving as Editor in Chief for the Journal of Bacteriology. 

O’Toole’s lab studies bacterial biofilm formation, c-di-GMP signaling networks and surface-sensing pathways. His laboratory also studies polymicrobial biofilm interactions and their impact on antibiotic tolerance, as well as how changes in gut microbiota in infants/children with cystic fibrosis impact local and systemic inflammation.

O’Toole has mentored 29 Ph.D. students, ~40 undergraduates, 17 post-docs, 7 physician-scientists and served on 80+ thesis and/or qualifying exam committees. He has served as PI of 2 NIH/T32-funded training programs (1 currently), as the director of Graduate Studies for °®¶¹´«Ã½ and Immunology (for 12+ years) and the co-director of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation-Research Development Program Training Core. He received the Dartmouth Graduate Faculty Mentoring award in 2008. He has served as co-director of the Microbial Diversity Course at the Marine Biological Laboratory. He also started and ran for 9 years an NSF-funded summer program at Dartmouth that brought 66 students, mostly women and students from groups under-represented in the sciences, to campus for an intensive summer research experience that included robust career-development activities.