Kaleigh successfully defended her PhD in Infectious Diseases and Microbiology from Pitt Public Health on January 6th, 2025. The room was packed, as was Zoom, including with family and friends.
Afterwards, we celebrated her accomplishments at the CVR and Cinderlands in Lawrenceville!
Amy said the following about Kaleigh prior to her public seminar:
“Kaleigh had the unfortunate luck to begin graduate school in the Fall of 2020 during the middle of the COVID pandemic, and she did all of her first semester classes on zoom. She rotated in my lab that fall and then committed in May of 2021. She passed her prelim exam in June 2021 and her Comprehensive exam in June of 2022. Kaleigh came in wanting to work on the neuropathogenesis project, which had suffered from some neglect within my lab, and she was the perfect person to come in and pick it up! She already had an MS degree so she had a certain element of maturity and experience that was greatly appreciated. Throughout her time in my lab, she brought new expertise and models in, and this required forging new collaborations in neurobiology such as Zak Wills and Dino D’Aiuto. She has done a ton of work to establish, characterize, and then use the models that she will tell you about in her defense. All of the beautiful images from my lab come from Kaleigh’s hands on the fluorescence confocal microscope! She already has 2 first-author publications and has another one close to submission. Kaleigh also trained undergraduate and MS students as well as contributed to several ongoing collaborative projects. Kaleigh also served in several leadership roles during her graduate studies, including with the students in IDM and on the DEI committee for American Society for Virology. I am excited for Kaleigh to stay in the lab as a post-doc to finish up some ongoing projects and also bring additional new technologies to the lab!”
