Lab Members

 

Current:

Amanda Zalud, Ph.D., Postdoctoral Fellow

Amanda received her B.S. degree from the University of South Dakota and a M.S. in clinical anatomy from Creighton University. She then served as an Instructor at Iowa Western Community College. She joined the Creighton MMI department as a graduate student in 2017. Her PhD project focused on characterizing the effects of tick-borne oxidants on both Lyme and relapsing fever Borrelia gene expression. She is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the lab investigating the role of the DnaK suppressor protein (DksA) in the Borrelia infectious cycle.

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Rose Grothaus, Ph.D. student

Rose received her B.S. degree from Concordia University. She joined the Bourret lab in 2022 and her Ph.D. work is focused on how post-translational modifications impact the gene regulatory function of DksA in Borrelia burgdorferi.

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Past:

Hannah Sorensen, M.S.

Hannah received her B.S. degree from the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and joined the Creighton MMI department in 2020. Her Master's project involved characterizing the impact of ROS and RNS on the gene regulatory activity of DksA in B. burgdorferi. She is currently a Quality Control Product Specialist for Streck Inc.

 

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Jeff Shaw, M.S., Ph.D. 

Jeff received his B.S. and M.S. in Biology from the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK). As an undergraduate, Jeff was an undergraduate research fellow and a Idea Network of Biomedical Research Excellence (INBRE) scholar. During that time he worked in the laboratory of Dr. Dawn Simon where he studied the evolution of introns. He joined my laboratory in 2013 while at UNK and successfully defended his Master's thesis in the Spring of 2015. In the summer of 2015, Jeff was accepted into the Ph.D. program in the Department of Medical Microbiology at Creighton University.  He received his PhD in 2019. He was a postdoctoral fellow Dr. Tim Cover's lab at Vanderbilt University and moved on as a Molecular Applications Specialist at GenMark Diagnostics. Jeff is currently a Discovery Business Manager for Roche.

 

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William (Bill) Boyle, M.S., Ph.D. 

Bill joined my laboratory as a technician in 2015, and entered our graduate program in 2016. He received his Master's degree in Biological Sciences from Mississippi State University working in the laboratory of Dr. Job Lopez studying the relapsing fever spirochete Borrelia turicatae. Bill's Ph.D. thesis project involved determining the role of the DnaK suppressor protein (DksA) in the pathogenesis of Borrelia burgdorferi. During his Ph.D. work, Bill spent a year in Dr. Frank Gherardini's lab at Rocky Mountain Laboratories, NIAID, NIH, where he developed an in vitro transcription assay system to study B. burgdorferi gene regulation. Bill received his PhD in 2019 and then served as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab before moving to Germany. 

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Sam Koshy, Undergraduate Researcher

Sam joined my laboratory as a freshman in 2016, and and worked with Bill to characterize the role of a 4-Cys zinc finger on the gene regulatory function of DksA in B. burgdorferi. He is currently an MD/PhD student at Creighton University. 

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