Dr. Cowardin received both her B.S. (2010) and Ph.D. (2015, Petri lab) from UVA before completing postdoctoral research with Dr. Jeffrey Gordon at Washington University in Saint Louis. Returning to UVA in July 2020 makes Dr. Cowardin a proud triple Hoo. She has been fascinated by the complex immune and bacterial environment of the gut since her days of undergraduate research, and is motivated to apply lessons learned from this work to understanding, preventing, and treating childhood undernutrition.

Yadeliz graduated from the University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras in May 2020 with a Bachelor of Natural Sciences focusing in Molecular Biology. Through her undergraduate years she worked in the environmental microbiology field characterizing Enterococcus spp. using Next Generation Sequencing and bioinformatics approaches. As a graduate student, she is motivated to venture in a new field of microbiology researching how the gut microbiome and the immune system influence stunting in children using an intergenerational mouse model.

Claire graduated with her B.S. in Biology from the University of Virginia in May 2022, and she is happy to now be a double Hoo in the BIMS program. She participated in undergraduate research in the field of cancer immunology in the Engelhard Lab but has always also been interested in how the microbiome interacts with the immune system, particularly how perturbations in the microbiome affect immune function. She is excited to study how changes in the maternal microbiome in the context of undernutrition affect immune development in offspring.

Lindsey is a rising third year undergraduate student at UVA. While pursuing a major in Global Public Health and a minor in Health and Wellbeing, she is intrigued by the molecular basis of childhood undernutrition, a rising public health concern. New to the immunology field, Lindsey is looking forward to researching the relationship between the innate immune system and gut inflammation in the context of childhood stunting. She is excited to explore changes in ILC lineages across the maternal and child microbiome.