• Postdoctoral Fellow, Cell Biology of Insect-Microbe Interactions, University of California, Santa Cruz, CA
• Ph.D., Microbiology, University of California, Davis, CA
• B.S., Cell Biology, University of California, Davis, CA

The project is focused on the bacterium Bartonella quintana, which is the causative agent of trench fever.  Both the human body louse and the bed bug are biologically competent vectors of this pathogen and we are interested in understanding how adaptation of the bacterium to each insect hosts alters its virulence upon transmission to human hosts.  This project will involve using qRT-PCR to quantify the expression of Bartonella virulence genes after passage through each insect host.