Her laboratory is interested in the mechanisms by which bacteria sense and respond to their extracellular environment. Vibrio cholerae is the bacterium that causes epidemic cholera, a disease that continues to spread in areas of the world where people lack access to clean drinking water. Due to increasing antibiotic resistance among V. cholerae strains, there is a need to develop additional therapeutic agents for cholera treatment. Current projects in the Matson lab include identification and characterization of small molecule inhibitors of a V. cholerae stress response pathway that may be developed into cholera therapeutics. Additional studies aim to characterize transcriptional responses of V. cholerae to various stresses to determine pathways associated with bacterial fitness and pathogenesis.