Alison Vrbanac Biomedical Sciences PhD Program

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Alison hails from Seattle where she attended the University of Washington, attaining a BS in Biochemistry. As an undergraduate she worked in the laboratory of Wim Hol, crystallizing components of the type II secretion system for structure-based drug design. However, she often found herself distractedly reading about disease pathogenesis related to the type II secretion system instead of structural biology and decided to a seek lab technician position in host-pathogen research. She spent two years as a lab technician in Deborah Dean's laboratory at UCSF Children's Hospital Oakland conducting Chlamydia trachomatis vaccine research. In 2015, she joined the UCSD Biomedical Sciences PhD program. Alison is a joint graduate student co-advised by Victor Nizet and Rob Knight. Her research broadly focuses on integrating the study of host-pathogen interactions with microbiome data to investigate how pathogens perturb the stability of microbial communities.