Orono, Maine, United States
In this position I taught students about Bacteriophage biology in the lab, classroom, and in "Phage Enrichment" office hours. My main responsibilities in the fall semester were maintaining the lab environment, guiding students with several procedures involving characterization of mycobacteriophage, and helping students troubleshoot augmented reality exercises. In the spring semester, I primarily provided feedback to students about making functional annotation calls on viral genes based on bioinformatics tools as well as facilitated cooperation between students in making poster presentations and genome announcements for their novel phages. In "Phage Enrichment" office hours, I offered additional support to students for Phage Genomics, Cell and Molecular Biology, General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Calculus, and the Honors Civ Sequence.
I have worked on several projects in the lab, but I use a combination of bioinformatics, large RNA sequencing datasets, and qPCR on Zebrafish models using influenza as a model pathogen to understand how neutrophil regulation in response to infection. My current project has been focused on trying to understand how low dosage arsenic exposure impacts inflammatory signaling.
In this 10 week program I took on a project trying to identify possible therapeutics that would interfere with a transcription of late lytic KSHV genes because of the reliance upon virus-specific transcriptional activators. This project ended up morphing into trying to understand the mechanism as to how a class of these potential therapeutics (histone deacetylase inhibitors) interferes with the viral lifecycle.