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Melissa Lodoen
Molecular Biology and Biochemistry
Dr. Melissa Lodoen received her B.A. from Dartmouth College and her Ph.D. from the University of California, San Francisco. As a graduate student in immunology, Dr. Lodoen became interested in how chronic pathogens interact with and evade the host immune response, by specifically examining the natural killer cell immunity to viral infection. For her postdoctoral work, she was drawn to the intracellular parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, which is highly efficient at modulating and evading host immune defenses. She has developed a sensitive method for detecting the injection of parasite proteins into host cells, which is a critical step in how the parasite modifies the host cell environment. Her current research focuses on defining the pathways by which Toxoplasma affects the expression of antigen presentation molecules in infected cells, in an effort to better understand the mechanisms of parasite immune evasion.
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