Home Department: Human Biology
Mentor: Shirit Einav, Medicine (Infectious Diseases) and Microbiology & Immunology

2018 Research Project: Dengue virus is a major global health threat, yet our understanding of how hosts respond to this infection is incomplete due to heterogeneous responses from individual cells even within a single host. A newly developed sequencing approach can help overcome this hurdle by painting a complete picture at the single cell level and the genome-wide scale. Ilham will use the results of sequencing different cells with this new approach, and thus contribute to the understanding of the virus-host interplay.

2020 Research Project: “Using Virus-Inclusive Single Cell RNA-seq to Better Understand the Pathogenesis of Severe Dengue in Children”

Dengue virus remains a global pediatric health threat, with 5-20% of patients progressing to severe infection associated with morbidity and mortality. Ilham will learn how to analyze single cell transcriptomic datasets obtained from pediatric peripheral blood mononuclear cell samples with both uncomplicated and severe dengue. She will learn how to define cells that are infected with dengue virus in these samples and how to monitor the host response to dengue infections in multiple distinct cell subtypes in these samples.