pove lab

Congrats to Kelly Hodges for successfully defending her master’s thesis entitled “Determining the role of cAMP signaling in cellular adhesion and parasite-vector interactions in Crithidia fasciculata“.

Congratulations to Andre R. Williams, Jr. for graduating with a BS degree in biology and completing a senior thesis entitled “Phosphodiesterase inhibitors block in vitro Adhesion of Crithidia fasciculata“. Andre is on to an NIH-funded bridge program at UMass-Amherst to prepare for a PhD program.

We are hiring! Our new NSF-funded, highly-collaborative project will examine the response of Crithidia parasites to different pollens in vitro and in vivo. We are interested in mechanisms of adhesion and genetic manipulation of kinetoplastid pathogens of bees. Please contact Dr. Povelones if you are interested. We have a fully-funded MS student position and a full-time research technician position available.

We are very excited about our first publication since our move to Villanova University. First author Maddie Malfara has been working on this project on and off since 2017, when she was an undergraduate in the lab. Working with collaborators at Penn State Schuylkill and Villanova University, we found a novel set of compounds that kill T. brucei by disrupting endocytosis, mitochondrial division, and the cell cycle. We’re hoping that these compounds will provide new ways to probe the connection between these essential processes.