Shannon Allen Whiles
USA
Immunology & Infectious Disease Doctoral Student
Shannon is a PhD student at Washington State University in the Immunology and Infectious Diseases program. Her research is focused on Francisella tularensis, a bacteria which is considered one of the most infectious known pathogens. Francisella causes the disease tularemia, also known as rabbit fever. She is specifically interested in how bacteria evade and sometimes even manipulate the human host immune system to cause disease. Understanding these host-pathogen interactions is important because as the threat of antibiotic resistance grows, so does the need for alternate therapeutics which target these interactions rather than the bacteria itself.
Before attending graduate school, Shannon earned her Bachelor's of Science in biochemistry from Middle Tennessee State University, during which she completed and defended an honor's thesis on natural product isolation. In the two years between undergraduate and graduate school, she worked as a microbiology quality control analyst for US Smokeless Tobacco and a research technician in a lab at East Tennessee State University studying kidney disease.