Steph Seifert, PhD
Primary Investigator
(she/her/hers)
Steph completed her doctoral thesis research in the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Disease Systems laboratory at UPenn. She then completed her postdoctoral training at the National Institutes of Health in the Laboratory of Virology/Virus Ecology Section where she studied the circulation of filoviruses and henipaviruses in African bats. This work included field sampling in the Republic of Congo and experimental work in the BSL4 at Rocky Mountain Laboratories. Steph has been active in outbreak response including EVD outbreaks in DRC and the COVID-19 pandemic. Steph received the NIH 2020 Merit Award for her participation in the early COVID-19 response including characterizing within-host evolution of SARS-CoV-2 in one of the first persistently infected patients. Steph is passionate about equity and accessibility in the sciences, particularly relating to international research collaborations. Outside the lab, Steph enjoys skiing with her partner, spending time with her three dogs, and riding horses.
Memberships
- American Society for Virology
- Society for Modeling & Theory in Population Biology
Senior Personnel
Alexander Brown, PhD
Senior Bioinformatician and Computational Biologist
Alexander completed his PhD at WSU and has spent several years working in industry. In the MEZAP lab, he has been leading the development of efficient bioinformatic pipelines for analysis of RNAseq data from nonmodel organisms including bats and wild rodents. He also hosts weekly “office hours/code review” to support trainee development in coding and reproducibility in computational biology.
Jenn Horton
Research Supervisor
Jenn is a researcher with more than 20 years experience spanning immunology to characterizing antimicrobial resistance. In the MEZAP lab, Jenn is leading the effort to establish new bat-derived cell lines and driving a large comparative transcriptomics study across divergent bat lineages.
Graduate Students
Irene Karegi, MSc
IID Graduate Student
Irene completed her MSc in BioChemistry at Jomo Kenyatta University of Science where she studied antimicrobial resistance in camels at the human-animal interface in Kenya. In the MEZAP lab, Irene is researching how adaptation to synanthropic living in wildlife influences zoonotic risk at the interface between humans-livestock-wildlife. Her research project will involve field collections with collaborators at the Institute of Primate Research and with the WSU Global Health – Kenya Program, molecular work with Dr. Michael Letko (WSU) of the Laboratory of Functional Viromics, and statistical modeling in collaboration with Dr. Pilar Fernandez (WSU) of the Eco-Epidemiology of Zoonotic Diseases Lab.
Ricardo Rivero, MSc
MPID PhD Candidate, Verena Lighthouse Scholar
(he/him)
Ricardo earned his BSc in Biotechnology from Institución Universitaria Colegio Mayor de Antioquia (Medellín, Colombia) and MSc in Tropical Microbiology from the Universidad de Córdoba (Montería, Colombia). Ricardo is interested in development of molecular, serological, and computational approaches for the study of zoonotic viruses, particularly those that are maintained in bats, mosquitoes, and rodents. His Ph.D. research in the MEZAP lab is focused on predicting the cross-species potential of known and novel viruses from bats and mosquitoes from -omics data. Ricardo has contributed to 18 peer-reviewed publications which can be found on Google Scholar.
Undergraduate Student Researchers
Grant Rickard
Undergraduate Researcher
Grant is an undergraduate researcher at WSU and is pursuing a career in medicine. He is currently working on completing his BSc in Molecular Biology. In the MEZAP lab, he is researching the genetic diversity of hantaviruses across the inland northwestern United States. When not in the lab, you can find Grant practicing his skills at darts or asleep in his hammock on a sunny day.
Affiliated Researchers
David Simons, PhD
Verena Fellow in Residence
(he/him)
David Simons is a clinician and PhD student at the Centre for Emerging, Endemic and Exotic diseases, Royal Veterinary College, London. David received a Fellows in Residence award to work with Steph and the Verena Institute on developing a database of host-virus associations and other data relating to Arenaviruses and Hantaviruses. David will be leveraging this database to test ecological and evolutionary hypotheses with these host-virus systems. David will be submitting his doctoral thesis in summer 2023 and is actively seeking postdoctoral opportunities. David has an excellent track record studying high consequence pathogens including Ebola virus and Lassa virus. Find out more about David and his work.
Former MEZAP Lab Members
Kyra Dimitrov
Undergraduate Researcher, Nov 2022 – May 2025
Kyra studied viral features that contribute to cross-species jumps, viral pathogenesis, and onward transmission of equine-associated viruses as part of her undergraduate honors thesis, graduating with distinction.
Julianna Gilson, MPH
Former IID Graduate Student, Aug 2023 – Nov 2024
Julianna studied ZIKV interactions between Old World and New World bats using in vitro models.
Stevie Fawcett, BSc
Undergraduate Researcher, Sept 2023 – May 2024
Stevie worked on hantaviruses, including assisting with field collections, testing field-collected samples, and assisting with isolation of hantaviruses in the BSL3 as part of his undergraduate honors thesis, graduating with distinction.
Jiwen Qiu, PhD
Scientific Assistant, Oct 2023 – Aug 2024
Mahsan Karimi, PhD
Scientific Assistant, Oct 2022 – Aug 2023
Mahsan assisted in the development of assays to study host-virus interactions in the MEZAP laboratory as part of the NSF BII Viral Emergence Research Institute including in vitro modeling of host-virus interactions at BSL3 and preparing samples for NGS and proteomics analyses.
Katherine McFerrin
Summer 2021
Undergraduate Researcher
Katherine was awarded the Kolenkow-Reitz Research Fellowship at Carleton College to do a summer research project in the MEZAP Lab. Over the summer, Katherine collected samples from rodents in the Palouse to test for hantaviruses, designed a primer set to broadly detect hantaviruses in field collected samples, and studied the coevolution of hantaviruses and their rodent hosts. Katherine is now a lab manager with Dr. Cara Brook at the University of Chicago.
Amy Hudgins
Summer 2022
DVM Student at WSU
Amy received the Veterinary Student Summer Research Fellowship from the WSU College of Veterinary Medicine to study leptospires in wild rodents and veterinary clinical samples from WA state. Amy assisted with field sampling of rodents in the Palouse and sequenced genomic amplicons from several bacterial species found in wild rodents. Amy received second place in the CVM Research Symposium poster competition for the veterinary student/house officer category. Amy is currently enrolled in the DVM program at WSU.