Dr. Nisha Duggal is currently an Associate Professor of Virology at the Department of Biomedical Sciences & Pathobiology, Virginia-Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine. She received a BS in Cellular and Molecular Biology from the University of Michigan in 2005. She then obtained a PhD in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of Washington in 2012. Her research interests include emerging arboviruses, virus transmission and pathogenesis, host-virus co-evolution and zika virus sexual transmission.
Dr. Christopher Thompson is currently an Assistant Professor at the School of Neuroscience, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. He joined Virginia Tech in 2016. He was one of the first new faculty members to join the School of Neuroscience. He was an undergraduate at the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana, where he received a BS in Ecology, Ethology, and Evolution in 2000. He earned his PhD in 2008 from the University of Washington in Neurobiology and Behavior, studying the effects of sex steroid hormones on seasonal changes in the song control system, a brain circuit that controls singing in songbirds, in the laboratory of Prof. Eliot Brenowitz. He continued working with songbirds as an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at Freie Universität in Berlin (Germany) in Prof. Constance Scharff’s laboratory, researching several aspects of song control system development. In 2011, Dr. Christopher Thompson joined Holly Cline’s laboratory at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA, focusing his research efforts on how the thyroid hormone shapes development of the visual system in tadpoles.
Dr. Andrea Bertke is currently an Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases in Public Health at the Department of Population Health Sciences, Virginia Maryland College of Veterinary Medicine, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University. She received a BS from Bowling Green State University in Microbiology in 2001 and obtained her PhD in Emerging Infectious Diseases from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in 2007. Her research interests include molecular mechanisms regulating herpes simplex virus latency and reactivation, neuronal pathways by which HSV1 and HSV2 reach the CNS, the role of the autonomic nervous system in HSV1 and HSV2 pathogenesis, the development of novel antivirals to prevent viral reactivation, the neurological impacts of SARS-CoV-2, and SARS-CoV-2 survival on food and food surfaces.
