Biography
I received my bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Alabama. My thesis focused on establishing an exercise method for fruit flies, which enabled me to study how exercise, diet, and genotype interactions influence variation in metabolic disease states across populations. After graduation, I worked in Dr. Olaf Kutsch’s lab at the University of Alabama at Birmingham with the goal of transitioning into virology research. My work centred around exploring the role of tetraspanin CD151 in cancer and T-cell biology, but I was also involved in research concerning HIV latency and SARS-CoV-2 infection. I joined the NIH Oxford-Cambridge PhD program to continue my viral immunology training. As an NIH-Cambridge scholar, under the co-mentorship of Dr. Leah Katzelnick (NIH/NIAID) and Dr. Jonathan Heeney (Veterinary Medicine) at Cambridge, I will explore how dengue re-exposure drives cellular and molecular B-cell diversity and its role in maintaining enduring, protective immunity to dengue infection.
Research
Viral Immunology, Lymphocyte Biology, Emerging Infectious Diseases
Publications
Carlin ER, Greer BD, Lowman KE, Duverger A, Wagner FH, Moylan DC, Dalecki A, Samuel S, Perez MD, Sabbaj S, Kutsch O. (2021). Extensive proteomic and transcriptomic changes quench the TCR/CD3 signal of latently HIV-1 infected T cells. PLoS Pathog. 17(1):e1008748. doi: 10.1371/journal.ppat.1008748.
Files JK, Boppana S, Perez MD, Sarkar S, Lowman KE, Qin K, Sterrett S, Carlin ER, Bansal A, Sabbaj S, Kutsch O, Kobie J, Goepfert P, Erdmann N. (2020). Sustained Cellular Dysregulation in Individuals Recovering from SARS-CoV-2 Infection. J Clin Invest. 29:140491. doi: 10.1172/JCI140491
Perez MD*, Seu L*, Lowman KE*, Moylan DC, Tidwell C, Samuel S, Duverger A, Wagner FH, Carlin ER, Sharma V, Pope B, Raman C, Erdmann N, Locke J, Hu H, Sabbaj S, Kutsch O. (2020). The tetraspanin CD151 marks a unique population of activated human T cells. Sci. Rep. 10(1):15748. doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-72719-8
