Congratulations to DOCTOR Jenna Gaska, who on August 29th defended her thesis titled “Molecular determinants of hepatitis C virus species tropism!” Jenna is the second doctoral student to receive her PhD in the Ploss lab, and she graduates with nine publications, plus one currently in review.

We are so proud of Jenna for her work on HCV tropism in vitro, which has led to many interesting discoveries in the field, and for learning bioinformatics (from scratch!) as a tool to analyze RNAseq data. Additionally, Jenna is an excellent editor and writer and has helped Ploss lab members with countless manuscript drafts and grant proposals. We are extremely proud of you, Jenna!

A selected list of Jenna’s publications from the Ploss lab:

• Winer BY, Gaska JM, Lipkowitz G, et al. Analysis of host responses to hepatitis B and delta viral infections in a micro-scalable hepatic co-culture system. Hepatology. 2019.
• Gaska JM, Balev M, Ding Q, Heller B, Ploss A. Differences across cyclophilin A orthologs contribute to the host range restriction of hepatitis C virus. Elife. 2019.
• Gaska JM, Ding Q, Ploss A. Mouse Models for Studying HCV Vaccines and Therapeutic Antibodies. Methods Mol Biol. 2019;1911:481-503.
• Ding Q, Gaska JM, Douam F, et al. Species-specific disruption of STING-dependent antiviral cellular defenses by the Zika virus NS2B3 protease. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2018;115(27):E6310-E6318.
• Douam F, Gaska JM, Winer BY, Ding Q, Von schaewen M, Ploss A. Genetic Dissection of the Host Tropism of Human-Tropic Pathogens. Annu Rev Genet. 2015;49:21-45.
• Gaska JM, Ploss A. Study of viral pathogenesis in humanized mice. Curr Opin Virol. 2015;11:14-20.