Chelsea Marie Braun, PhD: Understanding the Parasite Cryptosporidium

Chelsea Marie Braun, PhD, Associate Professor of Infectious Disease and International Health

Transcript
What I love about my research is the ability and freedom to think about big questions that are very impactful for child health, and then think about how our lab can best answer those questions using a variety of techniques ranging from basic benchwork to clinical research in human populations. My name is Chelsea Marie Braun, and I'm an associate research professor of infectious disease and international health. And my lab researches the parasite Cryptosporidium. And we're really interested in understanding across a variety of pathogens, particularly Cryptosporidium, why some people in a particular infection become very sick and other people remain asymptomatic. And we take data derived from human studies and really dig into those findings on a molecular level in our basic research program and try to integrate those findings to advance our understanding of this important question. My research will impact human health because understanding the differences in our individual human genomes that determine our response to an infectious or non-infectious disease has the potential to inform the development of novel host-directed therapies as well as improved vaccine design. We hope we can take findings that we learn from our studies and actually translate these to novel therapies using collaborative team science that’s available to us through our collaborators at UVA and beyond.