Grad students Chaudhari and Lasrado receive fellowship
Jayesh Chaudhari and Ninaad Lasrado, School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences graduate students, were named recipients of the Widaman Distinguished Graduate Fellowship Award in recognition of their research.
Chaudhari is researching porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus (PRRSV). His topic is to elucidate the mechanisms by which PRRSV can evade host immune responses to establish persistence of infection, using genome-wide transcriptomic analysis for RNA collected from the lymph node of persistently infected animals. Chaudhari is advised by Hiep Vu.
Lasrado’s research focuses on Group B Coxackieviruses (CVB) that are notoriously known to cause autoimmune myocarditis leading to heart failure and pancreatitis leading to type 1 diabetes. Lasrado is working on developing a monovalent CVB vaccine that can offer protection against multiple serotypes of CVB by developing the inactivated vaccine assembled with nanoparticles. In addition, his research focuses on developing immune therapies to promote T-regulatory cells and to utilize single-cell RNA sequence to dissect the complexity of dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), identify novel immune and non-immune cell subpopulations, and identify the transcriptomic signatures in the development of DCM. Lasrado is advised by Jay Reddy.
The Widaman Trust was established in 1975 through a generous gift provided to the University of Nebraska Foundation by Ms. Blanche Widaman. She asked that the income from the trust be used for basic research in agriculture and that the funds be used for scholarships or fellowships for graduate students conducting basic research in agriculture.