People

Hi my name is Kamryn Pfenning. I grew up in Nebraska and graduated from Nebraska Wesleyan University in May of 2022 studying Biochemistry and Molecular Biology and Spanish. I am currently completing a second gap year working as a research technician in the Crawford Lab and am applying to attend medical school in the fall of 2024.

I am a Biochemist from Tandil, a small city in Argentina. I did my Ph.D. at the University of Buenos Aires working on Bovine Leukemia Virus, a retrovirus that affects cattle causing a lymphoproliferative disease. During my graduate studies, I did an internship at Kansas State University at Dr. Raymond Rowland´s lab working on porcine viruses (PPRSV and PCV2). Later, I did a postdoctoral fellowship at the National University of the Center of Buenos Aires Province (UNCPBA) working under the supervision of Dr. Sandra Perez, studying the differences in neuropathogenesis between Bovine alphaherpesvirus 1 and 5. During that time, I did a four-month internship at Boston University with Dr. Juan Fuxan Bass working on functional genomics and discovering novel cis-regulatory elements in DNA viruses.

In Dr. Crawford´s lab, my project aims to characterize the kinetics of human herpesvirus 6 (HHV-6) latency and reactivation in different hematopoietic cell stages. My goal is to find crucial viral and cellular factors that control the recovery from latency that could be targeted with novel antivirals. My long-term plans focus on discovering novel antivirals for human and bovine herpesviruses.