Hello and welcome to our newest research technician, Chris Sebastian-Rubio, who will be managing all of our diverse animal colonies and techniques related to their development and care! Chris is a recent graduate of Rutgers University-New Brunswick, where he got his Bachelor's of Science in Cell Biology and Neuroscience. We're happy to have him…
The lab is getting many new faces this summer and one for the upcoming academic year! Please meet Wee-Ern Lau, Maxime Dubois, Suki Chen, and Jordan Becker!
Wee-Ern is our newest undergraduate student, joining Eileen and Laura, who joined us last fall. These three undergraduate students will be working diligently with their mentors to…
Welcome, Jae-Yeon Park, to our lab! Jae-Yeon earned his PhD at Chungnam National University in Korea and spent time working at the Institute of Animal Science as a postdoctoral researcher. In the Ploss lab, Jae-Yeon's postdoctoral focus will be on flaviviruses. We’re pleased to have you here, Jae-Yeon, and look forward to your contributions!
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…