Doug LaCount

Active Mentor - currently hosting PULSe students for laboratory rotations and recruiting PULSe students into the laboratory; serves on preliminary exam committees

Current Research Interests:

The central theme of my research program is the discovery and characterization of protein interaction networks between intracellular pathogens and their host cells. We seek to understand how intracellular pathogens manipulate host cells, how host cells respond to intracellular pathogens, and how this information can be exploited to develop new antimicrobial or antiviral drugs. We are interested in developing new host-pathogen protein interaction networks, comparing host-pathogen interaction networks from different organisms, and performing in-depth analyses of the roles of host proteins in virus and parasite lifecycles. Our research primarily focuses on two mosquito-transmitted pathogens that are major global health problems: the malaria parasite Plasmodium falciparum and dengue virus.