Garth Ehrlich

Garth D. Ehrlich, PhD, is a professor of microbiology and immunology and otolaryngology at Drexel University College of Medicine whose career has been defined by the integration of technology, innovation, and cross-disciplinary thinking. His work has led to major advances across diagnostics, informatics, artificial intelligence, infectious and genetic diseases, wound healing, and evolutionary biology. Dr. Ehrlich has extensive expertise in chronic bacterial and viral diseases and is widely recognized for transforming scientific understanding of chronic bacterial pathogenesis. His research helped establish the biofilm paradigm, first emerging from studies of chronic middle-ear disease in children and later generalized to demonstrate that most chronic microbial infections are biofilm-associated. He also advanced the Distributed Genome Hypothesis, aligning bacterial genomics and evolution with the wide clinical and phenotypic variability seen within bacterial species. More recently, he has pioneered the concept of population-level bacterial virulence factors, applying statistical genetics and machine learning to identify genes linked to tissue tropism and virulence. Dr. Ehrlich is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, and in 2025 was elected to the ILADS foundational class of fellows.