Trainees

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Annabella Castiglione
2026-present, Infectious Diseases
Mentor: Vasant Muralidharan

Annabella Castiglione earned her Bachelor’s degree in Biochemistry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2022. During her undergraduate studies, she investigated the role of Staphylococcus aureus superantigens in the pathogenesis of infective endocarditis. After graduation, she continued working in the lab as a research technician. Over the next few years, she examined how superantigens affect aortic endothelial cell migration, cytoskeletal rearrangements, and angiogenesis. This work sparked her interest in host-pathogen interactions and motivated her to pursue doctoral training. In 2024, she began her PhD in Infectious Diseases at UGA under the mentorship of Dr. Vasant Muralidharan. Her current research examines how rhoptry proteins contribute to Plasmodium falciparum invasion of red blood cells during the asexual blood-stage life cycle, with the broader goal of advancing our understanding of the mechanisms underlying malaria pathogenesis.

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Mya Covington
2026-present, Cellular Biology
Mentor: Vasant Muralidharan

Mya Covington received her bachelor’s degree in microbiology from the University of Georgia in 2022. Her undergraduate research focused on using a bacterial system to investigate vitamin K pathways in photosynthetic and non-photosynthetic plants. To gain experience in biomedical science and infectious diseases, she completed a year of research with Dr. Neil Grimsey as a UGA NIH PREP scholar. Her project focused on atypical p38 inflammatory signaling in endothelial cells during Toxoplasma gondii infection. Following this, she entered the Integrated Life Sciences program at UGA as a PhD student in 2023. She is currently a graduate student in Dr. Vasant Muralidharan’s lab, where her doctoral research examines the biological role of a truncated N-glycosylation pathway during the blood stage of Plasmodium falciparum.

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Anissa Waller Del Valle
2026-present, Cellular Biology
Mentor: Dennis Kyle

Anissa Waller Del Valle earned her Bachelor of Science in Biological Sciences from Clemson University in 2022, where she built a strong foundation in parasitology by investigating Trypanosoma brucei motility under Dr. Joshua Alper and evaluating anti-amoebic stress response modulators in Entamoeba histolytica under Dr. Lesly Temesvari. These experiences led her to join the laboratory of Dr. Dennis Kyle at the CTEGD, where she works on optimizing multidrug therapeutic strategies against Naegleria fowleri, the causative agent of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis.

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Leticia do Amaral
2026-present, Infectious Diseases
Mentor: Belen Cassera

Leticia do Amaral received her bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Georgia in 2021. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as an undergraduate researcher in the laboratories of Dr. Roberto Docampo and Dr. Silvia Moreno. While in this role, she contributed to projects studying both T. cruzi and T. gondii. After she graduated, she remained in the Moreno lab as a laboratory technician. To strengthen her research experience and prepare for graduate school, Leticia joined the NIH-funded PREP program at UGA as a member of the 2022–2023 cohort in Dr. Belen Cassera’s lab. The Cassera lab studies antimalarial drug discovery with a special focus on the asexual red blood cell stages of the P. falciparum life cycle. Following her year in PREP, Leticia remained in the Cassera lab as a PhD student in the Department of Infectious Diseases. Her current PhD research focuses on developing and validating novel antimalarial drugs and identifying new drug targets. Throughout her undergraduate and graduate studies, Leticia has become increasingly invested in parasitology and neglected disease research and hopes to continue this work in her future career.

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Mastura Khatun Ruma
2026-present, Precision One Health
Mentor: Doug Paton

Mastura Khatun Ruma received her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering from Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. She joined Dr. Douglas Paton’s laboratory in the Department of Infectious Diseases at the University of Georgia in 2023. In 2024, she completed the Biology of Parasitism course at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, where she received hands-on training in modern parasitology approaches. Her current research focuses on malaria transmission-blocking strategies by perturbing mitochondrial function in Plasmodium parasites during mosquito-stage development.

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Melissa Rogers
2023-present, Cellular Biology
Mentor: Diego Huet

Melissa Rogers developed an interest in parasite biology while taking a parasitology elective during the senior year of her undergraduate training at Western Carolina University (WCU). At the time, she was working towards her Bachelor of Arts in English with the goal of pursuing a career in medical writing. However, the parasitology class changed the trajectory of her life, and Melissa decided she wanted to research parasites. To gain the laboratory experience necessary to pursue this goal, Melissa worked as an undergraduate researcher and later as a master’s student in the lab of Dr. Heather Coan, who specializes in regenerative medicine at WCU. While in Dr. Coan’s lab, Melissa developed a cost-effective method for assessing cell recycling pathways in mammalian cells and went on to earn her M.S. in biology in 2024. In 2024, Melissa applied to UGA with the intention of joining a lab in the CTEGD. She was accepted into the ILS program and joined the lab of Dr. Diego Huet in the CTEGD and Department of Cellular Biology. In Dr. Huet’s lab, Melissa studies organelle communication at membrane contacts sites in the apicomplexan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. She is particularly interested in understanding how molecules like lipids and nucleotides are transported between apicomplexan-specific organelles in the parasite.

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Kenna Berg
2026-present, Infectious Diseases
Mentor: Alex Rosenberg

Kenna Berg received dual Bachelor of Science degrees in Biochemistry and Biology from North Carolina State University in 2022, where she conducted undergraduate research on DNA methylation biomarkers of hepatocellular carcinoma in the Hoyo Epidemiology and Environmental Epigenetics Laboratory. She went on to earn a Master of Science in Public Health Microbiology and Emerging Infectious Diseases from George Washington University in 2024, where she studied the mechanisms of anti-trypanosomatid drug action in Dr. Galadriel Hovel-Miner’s laboratory, showing that fexinidazole disrupts DNA synthesis and induces DNA damage in Trypanosoma brucei (Berg et al., PLOS NTD, 2025).

Kenna is now a PhD student in Dr. Alex Rosenberg’s laboratory in the Department of Infectious Diseases at UGA. Her dissertation research investigates how Toxoplasma gondii uses secreted effector proteins to transform host cells into a permissive replicative niche. A central theme of her work is that T. gondii effectors function as coordinated networks rather than isolated virulence factors (Berg et al., mBio, 2026). She is particularly interested in understanding how the parasite organizes effector delivery across the parasitophorous vacuole membrane and how secreted effectors converge to suppress host-cell death, questions that could ultimately reveal new vulnerabilities in one of the world’s most prevalent intracellular parasites.