Lara Pereira (Ph.D. 2005) earned her B.S. at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse in 2001. She joined the Microbiology Graduate Program in the same year and began her dissertation research, entitled “Control of the RpoN Flagellar Regulon in Helicobacter pylori”, in Tim Hoover’s laboratory. Lara’s research resulted in two first-author papers in Journal of Bacteriology (2005) and FEMS Microbiology Letters (2006) and a second-author paper in Microbiology (2009). After graduating with her Ph.D., Lara was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Aftab Ansari at Emory's Dept of Pathology where she studied SIV immunology and mechanisms of disease resistance in non-human primate models of AIDS (rhesus macaques and sooty mangabeys). She also performed a number of pre-clinical studies of cell lineage-specific inhibitors to better understand the role played by major innate and adaptive cell lineages in SIV pathogenesis and to explore the potential of these drugs as AIDS therapeutics. Lara is currently doing a second postdoc with Dr. Eric Hunter and Dr. Paul Spearman where she is studying retrovirology (HIV-1 and M-PMV) to gain a molecular perspective on virus infection. Lara has co-authored 12 papers as a post-doc.