Lab members

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.

Jasmine graduated from Florida Atlantic University in December 2019 with her Bachelor of Arts in Biological Sciences. Throughout her undergraduate education, she has been involved in research projects in the neuroscience and cell toxicology fields at multiple institutions. As a research lab technician, she is excited to use her previous experiences to work towards the goal of improving childhood health by investigating how stunting and undernutrition are affected by the gut microbiome of mother and child.

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.

Hamna is a third year undergraduate student at UVA. Having performed microbiology research in high school, she is excited to be delving into the field of immunology for the first time. In the lab, she is working on a project that investigates the link between platelet activation and inflammation in the context of undernutrition. She hopes to be able to understand if the mechanism is driven by changes in the microbiota that are a result of undernutrition.

Julee completed her medical school training and pediatric residency training in Miami, Florida and is currently a second year pediatric gastroenterology fellow at UVA. Her clinical interests include nutrition and inflammatory bowel disease and she hopes to further explore the intricate mechanisms of how the gut microbiome and pharmacologic therapy influence obesity in children with IBD.

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.