Dr. Cox's research focuses on bacterial viruses (bacteriophages), bacterial pathogenesis and the increasingly urgent need for new countermeasures to combat antibiotic resistant infection.  Current projects are aimed at exploiting the natural, highly conserved and species-specific signal amplification that results from infection of bacterial hosts with lytic phages as a rapid tool for detection, ID, drug resistance profiling and killing of a wide range of pathogens.  These strategic targets span the spectrum of clinical, agricultural, and food-borne pathogens as well as agents of biological warfare.  This work has pioneered new models of gut colonization, driven the development of novel lateral flow and mass spectrometric technologies and exposed undergraduate and graduate-level students to cutting-edge science with a view towards translational application of our discoveries to real-world health threats.