I’m a doctoral candidate with a passion for immunology and research experience in a variety of wildlife and livestock species, including pigs, cattle, white-tailed deer, elk, and mongooses. My research is supervised by co-major professors Drs. Crystal Loving and Michael Wannemeuhler and is conducted at the National Animal Disease Center, ARS, USDA through an inter-agency agreement with the Oak Ridge Institute of Science and Education, DOE.

The overall goal of my current research is to harness the intestinal immune system to improve gut and consequent overall health in pigs. Towards this end, I focus on defining the intestinal immune landscape in pigs and determining how early life intervention strategies, such as weaning, antibiotic usage, and dietary amendment, may influence the developing immune environment. Not only do I perform traditional wet lab assays, such as flow cytometry, immunohistochemistry, RNA in-situ hybridization, or quantitative PCR, to address my research questions, but I also utilize single-cell RNA sequencing and spatial transcriptomics technologies that allow me to study the intestinal immune system with high-resolution, global transcriptomic clarity. Therefore, a goal of my graduate career has been to become an integrated research immunologist able to address research questions through both traditional wet lab work and dry lab computations analyzing omics data.