Speakers

I spent almost 4 years in community college because I had no idea what I wanted to do and walked away with a liberal arts degree. Then went to San Jose State University and got a BS degree in Zoology because it was fun. I went to UC Davis where I got my PhD in entomology where I was trained as a theoretical population biologist studying the population biology of mosquitoes and their symbionts. I postdoc’ed at North Carolina State University, studying the theoretical population biology of transposable elements. I then started as assistant professor in the Malaria Research Institute at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and started a molecular pathogenesis and mosquito immunology lab, focusing on malaria and West Nile virus. After 8 years at Hopkins, I moved to Penn State University as Professor of Disease Epidemiology, where I’ve been for the last 14 years, and expanded the lab into molecular genetics, CRISPR, and dozens of vector-pathogen systems. Currently, we work on systems ranging from mosquito virus transmission to genetic engineering of chickens, and have a great deal of fun doing it.