Maddy successfully defended her thesis on Monday! Hartman Lab’s first PhD graduate!
Here is my introduction to Maddy:
Maddy received her undergraduate degree from THE Ohio State University with a BS in Agriculture and an Animal Sciences major. While at OSU, she worked as a surgical assistant in their lab animal resources group and also was a summer intern at Envigo. After graduating, Maddy worked for a year as a fellow at the Plum Island Animal Disease Center where she worked on Foot and mouth disease virus (FMDV).
This is when Maddy first contacted me by phone with interest in working in my lab. I encouraged her to apply to the IDM PhD program (she was originally considering the MS program). She did her first lab rotation with me in the fall of 2019 and then committed to my lab in March of 2020, right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. So Maddy completed all of her thesis work under challenging pandemic conditions. In the first few months of her tenure in the lab, she worked as part of a larger CVR team on the monkey model of SARS-CoV-2 that we developed (Hartman PLOS Path 2020). She also worked with Devin, a former student and tech, on the olfactory paper (Boyles JGV 2020).
During this time, Maddy expressed an interest in developing an ocular disease model of Rift Valley fever. Eye disease is a frequent outcome in people infected with RVFV, yet no experimental studies existed in the literature - just some animal studies documenting the presence of virus in the eye. So she set about to develop a rat model to understand the disease process and pathology as a result of infection. She sought out advice from the Opthalmology department and designed a fundus imaging setup for use in BSL-3. While this was not her main project in the lab, she published a nice study in Journal of Virology (Schwarz JVI 2022).
Concurrently, we had been working with Gaya Amarasinghe’s lab at WashU on a project identifying a potential new receptor for RVFV. In the early days of this work, we were still trying to validate the screen results and determine their significance. Maddy’s experience with rodents from OSU was very valuable as she worked with Cindy and Joe on the early experimental testing in mice. By performing the crucial in vitro and in vivo studies with RVFV ZH501 strain, she was co-second author on our initial publication (Ganaie, Schwarz et al. Cell 2021).
From there, she ran with it - initially subjecting a panel of bunyaviruses to our in vitro Lrp1 assays and honing in on a strong phenotype with Oropouche virus (OROV), kindly provided to us by Natasha Tilston-Lunel and Paul Duprex. This results in a paper coming together rather quickly (Schwarz et al. PNAS 2022). The final part of her thesis involved heavy animal work, looking at the in vivo relevance of Lrp1 using tissue-specific Lrp1 KO mice. This work is currently under review, so stay tuned. In total, Maddy has been part of 7 publications out of my lab, with another under review.
Some of Maddy’s accolades include being awarded the William T. Green Award in Public Health for 2020. She gave a virtual talk at ASV2021, and attended the Negative Strand Virus (NSV) conference in Portugal this past June of 2022, where she won a poster prize in the pathogenesis category. She also won 1st place in the PhD category at our departmental research day this year.
Maddy and I knew she was a great fit for my lab right from the beginning. She works hard and is super focused. She never shied away from any potential experiment. I thank her for taking a chance on me and my research program. We will miss her tremendously! She has taken a job at Abound Bio, so she will be close by.
Here are some photos from Maddy’s defense and celebration after. Congratulations Dr. Schwarz!!! We are so proud of you!!!
