Target Audience

Des Moines University faculty, staff, and students.

Objectives

1. Understand why MRSA is a significant threat to human health and how understanding the innate immune response may give us insights into designing novel therapies.
2. Understand the methodology used to test our hypotheses.
3. Ask questions about our data or future directions.

Speaker

Mallary Greenlee-Wacker, PhD is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Iowa, within the Inflammation Program.  She completed her Bachelor of Science in Biology at the University of California-Irvine in 2006, and her PhD in Biology in 2011 from the University of Notre Dame. As an undergraduate, she worked with Dr. Andrea Tenner, a leader in the field of complement biology, on C1q-mediated leukocyte activation. As a graduate student in Dr. Suzanne Bohlson’s laboratory, Dr. Greenlee-Wacker’s work focused on determining the molecular function of CD93 in inflammation, phagocytosis, and adhesion. During her current postdoctoral fellowship, she has focused her attention on elucidating the interaction between S. aureus and the innate immune response.  This work has provided exceptional opportunities to learn the principles of neutrophil biology in the context of human innate immunity and host defense against infection. Her ongoing and proposed studies apply analytical methods, including flow cytometry, animal models of inflammation, and cellular and molecular biology, to an integrated view of host-microbe interactions.