Dr. Monaco received her MD and PhD degrees at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and her Internal Medicine Residency and Infectious Diseases Fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis. She continued there as faculty in the Department of Medicine at Washington University from 2015 to 2017. She then joined the faculty of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the University of Rochester Medical Center in 2017, where she continues to pursue microbiome research and sees inpatient ID consults.

Dr. Monaco’s research involves elucidating components of the bacterial and viral microbiome in healthy and disease states using next-generation sequencing. She has shown that severe immunodeficiency in AIDS correlated with an expanded enteric virome and altered bacterial microbiome in a sub-Saharan cohort. She additionally is collaborating with colleagues at other institutions to study the lung microbiome in transplant recipients.