The Chromatography Forum

of Delaware Valley

Heather Bean is a bioanalytical chemist who specializes in the use of comprehensive two- dimensional gas chromatography and chemometrics for untargeted metabolomics and biomarker discovery. She received a PhD in Chemistry from Georgia Tech in 2008, then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Vermont and Dartmouth College as a Postdoctoral Fellow for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. In 2015 she joined the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University as an Assistant Professor.  Heather and her research team at ASU study the metabolomes of polymicrobial communities in chronic lung infections and in other natural and engineered environments. In the context of lung infections, the Bean Lab focuses on identifying metabolites that correspond to the dominant infection species, clinically-relevant infection phenotypes, microbe-microbe interactions, and host-microbiome interactions in the lung. The goals of this work are to translate these metabolites into biomarkers for diagnosing and characterizing chronic lung infections, and to identify new therapeutic targets for managing or eradicating the microbial communities in the lung.