As a dermatologist who has cared for numerous patients with neutrophilic skin disease in the setting of underlying inflammatory bowel disease, I've been long fascinated by how these skin conditions seem to mimic skin infections without growning pathogenic bacteria. Geil Merana one of the first PhD students to join the lab, joined me in this fascination and designed a series of elegant experiments to determine whether intestinal inflammation can change the immune response in the skin to otherwise innocuous skin bacteria. These "systemic" immunology quetions can be hard to tackle and Geil pushed the limits of our current approaches by tracking bacteria-specific immune cells in the gut and skin and even photoconverting cells in the gut to track their migration elsewhere. Her work was published May 31st in Cell Reports and featured this month as a UCSF news article. Please check them out. Congrats again Geil!