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 work focused on developing novel reporter systems that aided in suggesting the presence of redundant pathways and factors that function in in vitro rcDNA repair, necessary for narrowing a comprehensive set of host factors for rcDNA repair in order to better understand key steps in HBV infection.

Muj's thesis is titled "A High-Throughput Screen to Identify Small Molecular Inhibiting Yellow Fever Virus Infection." His work focused on in vitro studies to find a compound that exhibited antiviral activity against YFV while also maintaining low cytotoxicity, and could potentially have antiviral activity against other related flaviviruses.

RJ's thesis is titled "Investigating HCV Innate Immune Restriction in Non-Human Cells." His work focused on in silico analyses of human and murine PDLIM2 and STAT2, in vitro tools to probe STAT2 stability during HCV infection in human cells, and the generation of an HCV-susceptible mouse strain expressing human STAT2 to assess the in vivo impact of this mechanism.

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