Before joining the School of Public Health at The National University of Singapore, A/Prof Boucher worked for a decade at the University of Alberta, where he taught evolutionary microbiology and was a Fellow of the Integrated Microbial Biodiversity (IMB) programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). He has been working on the molecular evolution and epidemiology of infectious diseases in collaboration with the international health research organisation CDDR,B in Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Centers for Disease Control in the USA.

His research focuses on expanding knowledge of the “cholerae clade” by finding new species closely related to the etiological agent of cholera. As a member of SCELSE, he is developing culturomics of the human microbiome and looking at the transmission of microbes between humans and the environment. His research focuses on the life cycle of enteric bacterial pathogens, from their residence in the human microbiome to their dispersal and survival outside the body, investigating the evolution of new pathogenic variants during this cycle, such as the acquisition of antimicrobial resistance and novel virulence factors. Although disease mechanisms of several enteric pathogens have been well studied, their ecology is much less understood, especially their interactions with other microbes in the environment. As such, A/Prof Boucher is looking below the species level and focusing on the specific ecological preferences of a given lineage, both inside and outside its host, to gain a greater insight into the pathogen.

Research areas

• Discovery and characterisation of novel pathogens: genomic taxonomy and epidemiology
• Human and environmental reservoirs of enteric pathogens: molecular microbial ecology
• Emergence of novel pathogens: experimental evolution and evolution on human timescales