SARS Saturday… Chasing COVID

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image courtesy of Dr. Paul Duprex

Dr. Natasha Tilston-Lunel is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for Vaccine Research (CVR) at the University of Pittsburgh. She was born in London, UK and moved to Bangalore, India when she was eight years old. She has an undergraduate degree in Microbiology/Zoology/Chemistry from India and a Master’s degree in Environmental Science focusing on human health and epidemiology from the UK. Natasha’s interest lies in understanding how infectious diseases spread at an environmental as well as at a cellular level. She worked at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical medicine in the UK as a research assistant during the 2009 flu pandemic. Here, she was involved in setting up a web-based survey called Flusurvey, to understand self-reported trends of influenza-like-illness. She has also worked in different laboratories involved in Mycobacterium tuberculosis research. Natasha received her Ph.D. in 2016 from the University of St Andrews, Scotland specializing in Molecular Virology. After which she moved to the US to start her postdoctoral training in Boston. Natasha has worked with Oropouche virus, measles virus, canine distemper virus, Rift Valley fever virus and SARS-CoV-2. She loves everything about viruses and one day hopes to include virus hunting in her research. Aside from science, Natasha loves travelling, she’s visited eleven countries and lived in four of them. She loves hiking and spending time with her cat Tia, and has occasional spurts of interest in baking and sketching.

Sham Nambulli is a research scientist at the Center for Vaccine Research (CVR), University of Pittsburgh. He was born and brought up in Kerala, India. Sham completed his B.Sc. Microbiology from University of Madras, Chennai, India. He is very passionate about infectious diseases and how they affect us and the wider world. Therefore, early in his career he decided to specialize in Medical Microbiology and obtained a Masters diploma. He moved to the United Kingdom to pursue a Master’s program in Medical Microbiology in The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London. It was there he first studied viruses in detail in his Masters of Research thesis in Virology. Sham decided to continue researching viruses and he received his Ph.D. in Molecular Virology from Queen’s University of Belfast, UK. He has over 15 years of experience in virology and has been trained and worked in laboratories with biosafety level (BSL)-3 and ‑4 biocontainment capabilities. He also has clinical microbiology and clinical virology experience from India and United Kingdom. Dr. Nambulli studies molecular virology, viral pathogenesis (disease progression), therapeutic and vaccine interventions. Sham and his family were profiled by the Pittsburgh TribLIVE in their fly-on-the wall online mini-documentary In the Shadow of Salk .

Dr. Anita McElroy is a pediatric infectious disease physician with a research interest in hemorrhagic fever viruses. She obtained her PhD in Biology from University of California, San Diego, then did a post-doctoral fellowship in Bunyaviruses at the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. A lover of education, she then obtained her MD from the George Washington University. Following training in Pediatrics and Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Emory University along with 10 years spent working in CDC laboratories, she relocated to Pittsburgh where she is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. She provides clinical care to children with infectious diseases at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. Her lab studies Rift Valley fever virus, a virus found in Africa and the Middle East. She and her husband Craig have a super cute Chiweenie named Loki.