Despite the Covid pandemic hitting the country in early March and the restriction of any group gathering on Duke campus, our student Shengjie successfully defended her thesis in Jones Room 143 on March 13th, 2020 in front of her committee while streaming the whole public presentation through WebEx. We celebrated her defense afterward with champagne and cake.
Her thesis topic "Sentinel Functions of Tissue Resident Macrophages During Early Fungal Infections" especially featured the characterization of two distinct states of alveolar macrophages during early fungal infection. The results of her study will be published later this year in Science Immunology.
