Our senior undergraduate students, Heidi Temple and Sydney Mullin, are graduating from Princeton University! We will celebrate their achievements at our yearly summer lab barbecue.

Heidi's thesis is titled "Novel methods for recombinantly producing hepadnaviral relaxed circular and covalently closed circular DNA." Her work focused on developing novel methods for the generation of both HBV rcDNA and cccDNA in vitro and applying these methods to create cccDNA mutants and the genomes for other non-human hepadnaviruses, including duck, woodchuck, woolly monkey, and tent-making bat HBV.

Sydney's thesis is titled "Molecular Characterization of Usutu Virus Infection by Application of Novel Reporter Viruses." Her work focused on establishing a method for the generation and characterization of a series of reporter viruses that can be used to identify the cellular reservoirs of USUV and analyze the spatiotemporal dynamics of infection.

Congratulations to you both! We look forward to all that you will accomplish in the future!