Bridget Larman

Bridget was a Morehead-Cain Scholar and graduated with distinction from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a B.S. in Chemistry and minors in Biology and Spanish. At UNC she worked for three years in the laboratory of Dr. Kevin Weeks as part of the Undergraduate Transcriptome Project. Bridget’s research focused on applying novel chemical probing techniques to investigate the three-dimensional structure of the satellite tobacco mosaic virus genome. Her work indicated that the structure of the RNA genome plays an important role in assembly of the viral particle. This culminated in a first author publication in Biochemistry which was selected as an ACS Editors’ Choice article. 
In addition, Bridget spent a summer working for Dr. William Messer at the Oregon Health and Science University. She explored the function of a distinctive RNA structure in the dengue virus genome. This sparked her interest in infectious disease and virology. The following summer she worked at PharmaMar, a biotechnology company in Spain, investigating the molecular mechanism of an antitumor drug.

After graduation, Bridget joined the laboratory of Dr. Richard Proia in the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases as an NIH Postbaccalaureate Fellow. Her research focused on Sandhoff disease, a genetic lysosomal storage disease mainly affecting the brain. She used cerebral organoids generated from patient induced pluripotent stem cells to study the disease progression in a developing brain. 

As an NIH OxCam scholar, Bridget plans to investigate viral pathogenesis and host immune response.