The Vance Lab is thrilled to officially welcome our newest graduate student, Janet Babirye, to the lab. Janet hails from Kampala, Uganda, and attended Makerere University. During her MSc, she studied alternative diagnostic biomarkers for tuberculosis under Dr. Misaki Wayengera. She first visited Berkeley in 2019 as a visiting student to Sarah Stanley’s lab, before deciding to join the MCB program at Berkeley for her PhD. She is excited to continue working on host-pathogen interactions in the Vance Lab. For her PhD, Janet will be studying the adaptive immune response to Shigella flexneri, taking advantage of our new mouse model for Shigella that makes possible physiologically relevant in vivo immunological analyses of this important pathogen for the first time. In her free time, Janet enjoys dancing, running, hiking, and cooking. We are delighted to have Janet join the Vance Lab!