The medical school will welcome Vera Tarakanova, PhD, in March as the featured speaker for Seminars in Investigative Medicine.
Dr. Tarakanova’s presentation – “Gammaherpesvirus and STAT1: a bad romance” – is scheduled for noon to 1 p.m. on Wednesday, March 19, 2025, in TBL 2 at the W.E. Upjohn M.D. Campus in downtown Kalamazoo. A pizza lunch from Erbelli’s will be provided for attendees.
The event is free and MEDU credit is available. If you plan to attend, please register here. Individuals who RSVP will be admitted before those without a reservation.
Dr. Tarakanova is a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Dr. Tarakanova earned her PhD in microbiology at Saint Louis University where she studied human adenoviruses in William Wold’s group. Later, as a member of Skip Virgin’s group, she completed her postdoctoral training at the Washington University in Saint Louis where she continued her studies of cancer-associated viruses, enabled by the highly tractable murine gammaherpesvirus-68 system.
Over the past 16 years, Dr. Tarakaonva and her team at the Medical College of Wisconsin have conducted interdisciplinary studies defining host and viral factors that shape the pathogenic gammaherpesvirus-driven germinal center response. The Tarakanova group continues to uncover how traditional innate immune factors and host lipid metabolism are usurped by gammaherpesvirus to facilitate lytic replication and chronic infection of an intact natural host.
Seminars in Investigative Medicine is a research seminar series at WMed aimed at bringing together the community of investigators both within – and outside — the medical school.