Department: Scholars

Hi, my name is Luis A. Rodríguez Rodríguez. I grew up in Toa Alta, Puerto Rico and went to the University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo Campus. I graduated with a Bachelor’s in sciences with a concentration in Microbiology.

It was not until I was in high school that I realized my real interests. In these years, I took the general biology and chemistry courses, where through laboratories and activities, I fell in love with science. Also, I found it curious that beyond the biological macro perspective, where we observe everything with the naked eye, the entire planet is also home to microorganisms, which plays an essential role in nature and the organisms that inhabit it. These let me to develop an interest in the microbiology field. My bachelor’s in microbiology allowed me to learn and explore about different topics related to microbiology. Still, it was not until I took the courses of immunology and molecular biology that I began to show interest in learning more about host-pathogen interactions and infectious diseases. At the same time, my research interest arose after taking these courses’ laboratories, where I discovered a particular interest in biomedical science research.

Despite having participated in research projects during my undergraduate studies, I did not have the opportunity to research biomedical sciences, specifically in host-pathogens interactions and infectious diseases, thus I applied to the NIH-PREP at University of Georgia to acquire more experience and training in research before applying to a graduate program. What grabbed my attention to this program is that it offers training in infectious diseases research, which has allowed me to receive research training in a laboratory aligned with my research interests.

As a PREP@UGA scholar, I joined the Dr. Daniela Rajao and Dr. Daniel Perez Laboratory at the Poultry Diagnosis and Research Center. I worked with my research mentor, Dr. Joaquin Caceres, and an undergraduate research assistant, Claire Gay on the develop or improve methods for controlling influenza viruses.  My main focus is related to the development of Live Attenuated Influenza Virus (LAIV) vaccine platforms against H9N2 IAVs using the reverse genetic approach. H9N2 IAVs cause economic loss to the poultry industry, and due to their zoonotic potential, the World Health Organization places H9N2 among those with pandemic potential. My project’s objective is to evaluate the feasibility of developing a LAIV vaccine for H9N2 IAV by employing genomic rearrangements. In this project, I have used laboratory techniques such as Cell Culture Preparation, Plasmid Cloning, Reverse Genetic Transfection, Hemagglutination Assays, Reverse Transcript-PCR, Real Time-PCR, Sanger Sequencing, Luciferase Polymerase Assays, Viral Serial Passages, among others. Throughout my time in the Rajao/Perez Lab, I began learning the foundations needed to perform molecular biology and virology research. Beyond research experience, the PREP@UGA helped me develop skills such as project management, independence, time management, scientific maturity and good communication.

I aspire to obtain a doctoral degree to become a professor and leader investigator focused on elucidating crucial host-pathogen interactions for the development of novel antimicrobial treatments. After a PhD, I want to pursue post-doctoral training to enhance my training and acquire the skills necessary to excel in academia. As a mentor, being part of the Latinx community, one of my goals is to promote STEM careers in disadvantaged communities by establishing links with the National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) to encourage diversity in Biomedical Sciences programs.

PREP@UGA – Cohort 6 2019-2020

Master’s Degree, Mercer University

Hello, my name is Fredejah and I was born in St. Croix, U.S.V.I. I attended undergraduate at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke where I obtained my Bachelor’s in the Science of Biology. I was a part of the NIH’s RISE program during undergrad for about 2 years, upon graduation I was accepted into the NIH’s PREP program here at UGA. I have been a PREP scholar for going on 2 years now and I am currently conducting research in the Center for Vaccines and Immunology in the Jarrod Mousa lab. I am working to characterize human monoclonal antibodies against a highly conserved surface protein of S. pneumoniae, the pneumococcal histidine triad D (PhtD). Specifically, I mapped the epitopes targeted by each human antibody by cloning and recombinantly expressing truncated fragments of PhtD, which were used in ELISA assays to determine antibody binding. I determined the serotype breadth of the human mAbs by conducting western blots and ELISA assays with fixed bacteria and probed with each mAb to assess binding. In addition, we are assessing the therapeutic efficacy of the human antibodies in a mouse model of pneumococcal infection. As part of this project, I have carried out experiments that involve gene cloning, ELISA, PCR, protein expression and purification, size exclusion chromatography, whole cell ELISAs, western blots, and mouse studies. These studies will enable us to understand the mechanism by which human antibodies target this surface protein in efforts to create broadly reactive antibody therapeutics. I plan to further my education by joining a PhD program in the Fall of 2021. My areas of interest are Immunology, Bacterial pathogenesis, host-pathogen interactions, Virology, and Microbiology.

PREP@UGA – Cohort 6 2019-2020

Jewel is currently attending the University of Maryland.

Hello, my name is Morgan Barkley. I was born and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. When I started as a biology major at Clark Atlanta University, I thought becoming a physician was the only way I could apply my scientific knowledge. However, I met my Microbiology professor and mentor, Dr. David Logan. He was the first person to introduce me to the research world and explain the importance of it. Participating in the microbiology wet lab, exposed me to scientific inquiry that sparked my curiosity for specific subjects. After the microbiology course, Dr. Logan continued to push me to pursue the research experience. Towards the end of my junior year, I applied to UGA Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Summer Program. I accepted the invitation for UGA REU program with the aim of gaining experience, conducting research and further develop my lab skills. I spent the summer working in Dr. David Garfinkel’s lab, which focuses on the mechanism of Ty1 element retrotransposition and copy number control (CNC) in the budding yeast Saccharomyces (S.cerevisiae). With his guidance I explored the prevalence and variation of CNC in six haploid derivatives of domesticated and wild S. cerevisiae strains from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, as well as the S288c reference strain. This experience ignited my interest in research to thrive. A year later, I graduated from Clark Atlanta University with a Bachelor of Science degree and a handful of research experience. The next step would be graduate school. Before entering graduate school, I decided to apply to the PREP@UGA scholar post baccalaureate program because I wanted to gain more research experience and become prepared for the challenges of graduate school. While in PREP@UGA I decided to gain research experience in Dr. Jarrod Call’s lab. Working close with my mentors gave me a better understanding of atrophy in muscle fibers and how certain complexes in the mitochondria affect respiration rates. These experiences gave me the confidence to keep pursuing research. After completing the PREP@UGA program, I was accepted into Graduate Biomedical Sciences program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Currently, I am a PhD student in the Cell, Molecular & Developmental Biology theme. I recently just joined Dr. Andrew Pickering’s lab, which focuses on investigating the role of proteostasis in aging and neurodegenerative disease. My current project focuses on understanding the role of TXNIP and the influence it has on organism’s lifespan. Grad school is very challenging, but my past experiences have taught me how to embrace these challenges without fear.

My name is Sarah Dysinger, and I attend the University of Pennsylvania. I’m in the Microbiology, Virology, and Parasitology group in the Cell and Molecular Biology program within the Biomedical Graduate School at the University of Pennsylvania. I just completed my first rotation working on a COVID project. My next rotation starts in January.

I’m a graduate PhD student here at UGA after having matriculated through the ILS program. I’ve joined Dr. Claire de La Serre’s gastrointestinal neurophysiology lab in the department of nutrition as a microbiology student. Currently, my project focuses on how reconstruction of the vagus nerve can influence or rectify over-eating patterns. Grad school has been treating me well, I’m very blessed to be here and to be learning about the concepts specifically related to the future I envision for myself.

My name is Jilarie A. Santos Santiago and I am originally from Carolina, Puerto Rico. I attended the University of Puerto Rico, Humacao campus where I obtained my bachelor’s degree in General Biology.

Since I was little I was a curious about everything. I always asked “too many” questions and wanted to know what happened inside animals, cells or inanimate objects. During my time in high school I decided that the ideal profession for me was to be a physician. As an undergraduate student, I started looking for extracurricular opportunities that would help me become familiar with the environment in hospitals. I joined the Pathology Laboratory at the Veteran Affairs Hospital in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, I learned about tissues, histology and the importance of understanding cellular and molecular events in decision making from physicians, but also discovered a professional career more aligned with my innate curiosity, research. That was the first experience that led me to conclude that research was the ideal career for me. Is the profession that will allow me to go from one question to another. Is the perfect environment to contribute knowledge to society and making cutting edge discoveries.

The area of research that I am most interested include infectious diseases related to the microbiome and the host-pathogen interaction in the gut.

By the time I graduated, I was sure I wanted to pursue a PhD, but I felt I did not have enough research experience. I wanted to be immersed in the environment to which I wanted to commit in the long term. To have the opportunity to be part of the development of a project and to continue developing my critical thinking and decision making skills. I was looking for a program that would help me strengthen my base as a scientist. The PREP@UGA provided me with all these opportunities. In addition to this, it is an excellent program to discover your interests and have a smoother transition to graduate school.

Communication is one of the most important features of the scientific community. Communicating your results and research effectively is crucial. I hope to get from PREP@UGA the necessary tools to share my effectively to scientific and non-scientific communities.

This year I will be in the laboratory of Dr. Steve Hajduk and my mentor will be Dr. Michael Cipriano.

In Dr. Hajduk’s lab we work on Trypanosoma brucei, a protozoan parasite that infects mammals. Subspecies of T. brucei, like T. brucei gambiense and T. brucei rhodesiense, cause human Trypanosomiasis, more commonly known as African sleeping sickness. Trypanosoma brucei is the causative agent of Nagana disease in cattle. Various organisms, including bacteria and eukaryotic, including these parasites, produce small membrane bound vesicles, also known as extracellular vesicles (EVs). Proposed roles for EVs include transfer of drug resistance, growth regulation, quorum sensing, immune regulation, developmental regulation and neurotransmission. Trypanosomes are transmitted through the tsetse fly. When these parasites are in the bloodstream of the infected mammal, they differentiate from a proliferative (long-slender) to a non-proliferative (short-stumpy) stage. This differentiation is mediated by SIF, the stumpy induction factor. The identity of SIF is yet to be determined, but recent publications suggest that oligopeptides produced by peptidases can be internalized by long-slender through a transmembrane receptor, and is this internalization that leads to differentiation.

My role in Dr. Hajduk’s laboratory is to determine if EVs play a role in this differentiation. I seek to verify whether EVs carry enzymatically active proteases derived from the parasite that can provide these oligopeptides or if EVs provide the substrate to host-derived proteases.

The techniques I have used include cell culture, nucleic acid isolation and sequencing from parasite derived EVs, molecular cloning, Mass Spectrometry, proteomic analysis, vesicle quantification, among others.

My name is Kristen Dominguez and I am from Miami, Florida. I double majored in Psychology and Biology at Florida International University, where I first discovered my passion to become a research scientist.

Originally, I was a pre-medical student, thinking I was destined to become a physician my whole life; that is, until I met my undergraduate research mentor during my fourth year, Dr. Evelyn Gaiser. Throughout my experience in her lab studying phytoplankton dynamics, I became enamored with the research process and presented at my first conference. It was here that I met a diverse and international group of passionate scientists that completely opened my eyes to the field of becoming a research scientist. I tackled on a fifth year of study to obtain the Biology degree and during that time took courses such as Parasitology, Virology, and Ecology. I was hooked.

These experiences led me to understand how little I knew about the field of researching infectious diseases. This is why I am here now in the PREP@UGA program. This program offers me exactly what I was looking for – an interdisciplinary training in infectious research. There simply was not another program that gave me the option to work with such a diverse array of faculty conducting infectious disease research. PREP@UGA not only gives me more research experience in my field of interest, but also gives me the opportunity to attend and present at conferences, develop as a professional, and take coursework to prepare for graduate school.

Currently, I am in Dr. Michael Yabsley’s lab studying related native and invasive tick phylogenetics and molecular techniques, as well as screening for a target bacterium, Rickettsia. The invasive tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis, has recently become established in several states throughout the eastern US. This tick is especially concerning due to its ability to reproduce parthenogenetically, feed on a diverse host range with higher burdens, and transmit a large number of pathogens. Because there are now four Haemaphysalis species in the New World, we are developing a restriction fragment length polymorphism assay utilizing two gene targets in order to have a more rapid and cost-effective method for confirming the presence of the invasive tick. In addition, I have also been screening the invasive tick for Rickettsia. Due to the array of Rickettsia species that inhabit ticks, both pathogenic and endosymbiotic, it is important to understand their degree of diversity. This allows for better prediction of bacteria transmission and maintenance across multiple tick species and their hosts. I have also taken up a side project to survey the Rickettsia communities within hispid cotton rats in Georgia. This will be a descriptive study to further determine the maintenance ability of this bacteria.

For these projects, I am given the opportunity to gain skills in molecular biology (including PCR), basic bioinformatics (using Geneious, MEGA, and R studio software to create phylogenetic trees, map modeling, etc.), fieldwork (trapping animals to collect ticks and cotton rat samples), and necropsy techniques (to obtain cotton rat spleen samples).

This year at PREP@UGA will more than prepare me to begin a Ph.D. program in infectious diseases. From there, I will begin a post-doctoral training position to continue in an academia or industry position.

My name is Ayush Kumar and I was born in the Fiji Islands and immigrated to the United States when I was five to the state of Oregon. In order to broaden my scope of awareness in research, I applied and was accepted to the NSF REU “Exploring the Anthropocene” at the Great Rivers Field Station and received mentorship from Dr. Colaninno-Meeks and Dr. Chick. The goal of the research was to use ecological and archaeological datasets to understand how anthropogenic factors affect water quality and fish communities. I spent the majority of my time on large fishing boats on the Mississippi River electrofishing and collecting water quality samples. My goal was to analyze and relate species richness to various chemical concentrations in locations along the river. Ultimately, we wanted to gauge how population distribution changed over time due to pollution, hydrologic dams, and levees. This experience was formative for me because I gained experience with population health and wildlife management and also field and laboratory work, including working with live wild organisms and performing quantitative analysis with large data sets. I was also able to present my research at the Mississippi River Research Consortium on how water quality has affected fish communities since the Clean Water Act, further developing my public speaking and communication skills. As a biology major at a small liberal arts college, I had limited options for research on campus. To gain research experience, I interned at the Oregon National Primate Center (ONPRC) in the Vaccine and Gene Therapy Institute (VGTI) where I developed my technical skills and virology knowledge. Working alongside postdoctoral associate, Dr. Travis Whitmer, I learned about HIV’s ability to evade detection by T-Helper Cells, which typically detect invaders using their MHC Class I proteins. The main goal of the project was to use HCMV as a vector to express foreign antigens (HIV/TB), which generates novel T cell responses that are protective against their corresponding diseases. We were able to look at the closely related rhesus macaque CMV and test these different constructs in vivo to see how the primate immune system responds. Thus, this would ideally provide us with an idea of how a human test subject would respond to HCMV. I was responsible for the molecular portion of the project: cloning, conducting RT PCR, examining DNA segments virtually, and checking the accuracy of the clones for further use in future experiments. My role in the project allowed me to develop technical skills in sequencing and cloning. As a result, I became interested in virology and disease ecology due to my mentorship with Dr. Whitmer, which further initiated my desire for graduate school. Education: Concordia University, Honors Program, Major: Biology, Minor(s): Psychology and Spanish Description: In August 2018, I started working at the UGA Poultry Diagnostic and Research Center in the Rajao/Perez Lab. In the beginning I was trained in basic lab techniques and I was able to work with a graduate student, Brittany Seibert and my mentor Dr. Cardenas Garcia. With the exceptional mentorship, I was able expand my knowledge about influenza A and B and learn techniques associated with Reverse Genetics and vaccine development. Influenza A (IAV) and Influenza B (IBV) are enveloped viruses with a negative-sense, segmented, single-stranded RNA genome, with eight viral RNA (vRNA) segments. For my project, I primarily worked with influenza B, which can cause outbreaks of seasonal flu and can be just as severe as Influenza A. Influenza B was only known to infect humans (mainly adolescents, school children, and geriatric patients) and comprises up to 20-30% of infections. Influenza B also evolves slower than Influenza A viruses. It has been reported that this virus can infect pigs (Ran, et al., 2015).
Research: In this project, I worked with Influenza B/Brisbane, which was isolated in Australia in 2008. So the major goal is to evaluate to which extent to use swine polymerase I promoter (spolI) with the B/Bris virus. Why do we want to test the spoll? The reason we want to test this is because pol I promoters are species specific and we want to determine if this reverse genetics systems carrying the spoll promoters will be more efficient than hpolI. We also want to assess the viability of a reverse genetics vector carrying the spolI promoter to rescue recombinant IBVs in swine and human origin cells.
We investigated the viability of reverse genetics plasmid vectors containing the swine pol I promoter (spoll) and B/Brisbane/60/2008 (B/Bris) influenza virus, and their capability for virus rescue in HEK293T/MDCK or PK-15/MDCK co-cultures. These viruses are derived from full length cDNA of the influenza viral gene segments. Therefore, with the ability to generate recombinant viruses that have mutations in the viral genome, we can identify the viral and host factors that contribute to influenza pathogenesis, transmissibility, host-range, host/pathogen interactions and restrictions, and virulence. First, we subcloned all eight gene segments from B/Bris into a reverse genetics vector containing the spoll, giving origin to eight plasmids, each one containing a gene segment. Then, we assessed the viability of the newly generated plasmids by transfecting HEK293T/MDCK co-cultures using the 7+1 method (seven plasmids known to function properly and one plasmid containing the gene of interest and the spoll). The project allowed us to understand the potential of spoll for in vivo IV reverse genetics in swine models.
Future: After completing the PREP@UGA program, I will be attending Ontario Veterinary College at the University of Guelph Doctor of Veterinary Medicine Program. My plan after receiving my DVM is to continue on in a PhD program and pursue my interest in Laboratory Animal Medicine. For me PREP@UGA was a steppingstone towards gaining experience in research and understanding the expectations that graduate schools have. Thus, PREP@UGA provided me with exceptional research opportunities, mentorship, and support for my future.