Laura Fuhrman

Hi, my name is Laura Fuhrman and I enrolled in the UPGG here at Duke in 2003. I was born and raised in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania where I lived for 23 years. I attended Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania where I received a BS in molecular biology and biochemistry. While at LVC, I was involved in a behavioral research study involving the differences in spatial learning abilities between male and female rats. After graduating college in May 2003, I moved on to Hershey Medical Center to participate in a summer research project studying the role of gag protein in the budding process of Raus Sarcoma Virus. Here at Duke, after rotating through the labs of Doug Marchuk, Blanche Capel and Alejandro Aballay, I have decided to stay in the Aballay lab and study the innate immune response of C. elegans to bacterial infection. Specifically, I am using classical genetic techniques to map novel genes involved in the survival of nematodes when challenged by various pathogens, in the hopes that this information may have relevance to human immunity processes.

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