The lab is delighted to welcome two new graduate students to the lab, Abby Burtner and Wendi Deng.
Before coming to UC Berkeley, Wendi studied microcins, an understudied class of antimicrobial proteins, in Bryan Davies’ lab at UT Austin. Now, he has shifted his focus from microbes alone to microbe-host interaction by studying how the immune system both protects against and contributes to M. tuberculosis lung infection. Outside the lab, Wendi enjoys gaming, watching dramas, and drawing.
Abby grew up in the Pacific Northwest and attended the University of Washington in Seattle. There, she worked on protein design in Neil King’s lab before spending a year in England working on type I interferon signaling in Brian Ferguson’s lab at Cambridge. She is excited to continue working on innate immunity in the ETI arm of the lab. She is also excited to be in sunny Berkeley where she can now do endurance sports in her free time without getting rained on.