No one is ever pleasantly surprised to find mold growing on food that has been left in the fridge too long. But everyday there is plenty of mold around us that we don’t see, including hundreds of spores of some types of invisible mold that we unknowingly inhale.

While this probably sounds pretty alarming and disgusting, Aspergillus fumigatus is not harmful to most people. However, for someone with a weakened immune system, this fungus poses serious health dangers.

Reinhard Laubenbacher, joint faculty member at UConn Health and The Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine, has received more than $3 million from the National Institutes of Health National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to use mathematical and computational tools to explore new potential therapeutic targets to treat those affected by invasive aspergillosis.  Read more.