Bio
Jennifer is from Cedar Rapids, IA and in 2016 obtained her B.S. in biochemistry from Iowa State University with minors in genetics and microbiology. She joined the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program (IGP) at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN in 2016 and in 2017 joined the lab of Dr. Mark Denison in the Ph.D. program of Microbe-Host Interactions. Her work in the Denison Lab has focused on coronavirus replication, with particular emphasis on RNA synthesis and viral recombination during both normal viral infection and in viral inhibition through either genetic attenuation or antiviral treatments. She has established multiple computational pipelines to study coronavirus RNA mutations and recombination, combining both traditional virological approaches with next-generation RNA sequencing platforms. Jennifer lives with her husband David in Smyrna, TN and in her free time enjoys travelling, painting, and baking for her lab.