Our senior undergraduate students, Blaise Stone, Jonathan Afowork, Noah Im, and Sofia Sepulveda-Pizarro, are graduating from Princeton University! We will celebrate their achievements at our yearly summer lab barbecue.
Blaise's thesis was on hepatitis B virus, as was Noah's, and they were primarily mentored by Andoni Gomez Moreno, PhD…
On April 14, 2026, the Board of Trustees of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation announced its 101st class of Guggenheim Fellows, and Alex was selected as a Fellow in Medicine and Health!
Here is an excerpt from the original announcement:
Chosen through a rigorous application and peer review process from a pool of nearly 5…
Yeliz Sezgin joined our lab this fall as our new graduate rotation student! She will be investigating questions about flaviviruses, such as West Nile virus, during her rotation over the next few months. Her passion for science and hands-on experience make her a wonderful addition to the lab.
We're excited to see everything that she will…
Say hello to Dr. Jiayu Zhang! Jiayu successfully defended his doctoral thesis on "The Adaptive Mutations of Flaviviruses: Implications for Vaccine Development and Virus Evolution" at his final public oral on Thursday, November 6, 2025, with Alex as his doctoral mentor. His work focused on utilizing high-throughput sequencing and reverse…
Welcome, Samer (Sam) Ayoub, to our lab! Sam earned his PhD at Bar Ilan University, working in the Meital Tal-Ganamy lab, where he researched host factors involved in HCV and SARS-CoV-2 infection. His postdoctoral focus will be on HBV, and he will contribute to various ongoing projects. We’re pleased to have you here, Sam, and look forward to…
The lab is excited to welcome two new undergraduate students this academic year: Eileen Zheng and Laura Sabrosa Silva. These juniors will be paired with graduate or postdoctoral mentors once their projects are outlined for their junior proposals. After submitting these, they will begin their lab work and start collecting preliminary data before…
Say hello to Dr. Michael Schwoerer! Michael successfully defended his doctoral thesis on "Barriers to Hepatitis C Infection in Mice" at his final public oral on Wednesday, July 16, 2025, with Alex as his doctoral mentor. His work focused on genetic attempts to create a mouse infection model, which so far have not succeeded, in an effort to…
Our senior undergraduate students, Fariha Begum, Mujtaba (Muj) Yousufi, and Ronald (RJ) Anglade, are graduating from Princeton University! We will celebrate their achievements at our yearly summer lab barbecue.
Fariha's thesis is titled "Identifying Host Factors Governing Hepatitis B Virus Covalently Closed Circular DNA Biogenesis." Her…
Welcome Sukanya Chakravarty to our lab! Sukanya completed her doctoral training at the University of Toledo in the Chattopadhyay lab. She studied host innate immune response against respiratory viruses and investigated the non-transcriptional roles of IRF3 in mice. She will continue as one of our postdoctoral fellows, and her work will focus on…
Congratulations to Alex for being appointed as co-director of the Global Health program. Click for the full article available on Princeton's Global Health website.