Student Profiles

Kelsey is originally from the metro-Atlanta area, where the presence of the CDC acted as a constant, peripheral reminder for the importance of disease research throughout her childhood. For her undergraduate education, she attended the University of Alabama (UA). Hoping to better understand disease research, she joined Dr. Laura Reed’s population genetics lab during her freshman year. The lab’s research focused on the genetic and environmental interactions that underlie metabolic diseases, and her early work there centered around the interactions that exist between diet and genotype. By the end of her sophomore year, she knew she wanted to pursue disease research for her career. In pursuit of that, she joined UA’s Accelerated Master’s Program and began her thesis research. Over the next 2.5 years, Kelsey worked to complete her undergraduate degree alongside her thesis research project to graduate from the University of Alabama with her B.S in Microbiology and her M.S. in Biology. Her thesis work focused on establishing a method and protocol for exercising fruit flies in the lab, which enabled her to study how exercise, diet, sex, and genotype interact together to influence the variation in metabolic disease states seen across populations. Towards the end of her master’s, Kelsey realized that while she loved disease research, the diseases she was most passionate about were infectious ones.

After graduation, Kelsey started a position as a Research Assistant in Dr. Olaf Kutsch’s lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) with the goal of transitioning into infectious disease research. The main research focus of the lab was to uncover molecular mechanisms of HIV-1 latency, but often work branched into a variety of other topics. Kelsey’s primary work centered around exploring the role of the tetraspanin CD151 in cancer and T-cell biology, but she was also actively involved in research concerning HIV reactivation and SARS-CoV-2 infection. Her work at UAB introduced her to a variety of immune diseases and pathogens, which solidified her choice to pursue infection disease research. This led her join the NIH OxCam Program for her PhD training. As an NIH-Cambridge scholar, under the co-mentorship of Dr. Leah Katzelnick (NIAID) at the NIH and Dr. Jonathan Heeney in the Department of Veterinary Medicine at Cambridge, Kelsey will explore the importance of re-exposure in maintaining enduring, protective immunity to dengue infection. Upon graduation, Kelsey hopes to continue to pursue a career in viral immunology research and one day establish her own lab researching the interplay between viruses and host immunity.