PhD candidate Jennifer Habel awarded prestigious CEIRR Training Fellowship

PhD Candidate Jennifer Habel, a member of the Kedzierska Laboratory at the Doherty Institute, has been awarded a prestigious Centres of Excellence for Influenza Research and Response Training Fellowship.

Ms Habel has been awarded funding to study at St Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, USA, to help better understand immune responses to respiratory viruses in pregnant women.

At St Jude Jennifer will perform in-depth single cell transcriptomic analyses on antigen-specific maternal T and B cells to provide molecular insights into adaptive immune responses during pregnancy.

She will compare immune responses in a unique cohort of matched maternal blood, cord blood, and placenta from pregnant women who had COVID-19 during pregnancy along with healthy control samples from pregnant and non-pregnant women.

Ms Habel joined the Kedzierska Lab in 2019 for her honours degree and started her PhD in March, 2020.

"My interest in research began as a fascination with cytotoxic T cells, and more recently has expanded more broadly to various immune cells such as innate-like T cells and NK cells as these are important in pregnant women," she said.

Ms Habel said her PhD focuses on immune responses to respiratory viruses in pregnant women, as they are considered a high-risk group.

"In 2020 I published one of the first studies on CD8+ T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2, and have a study on immune responses to COVID-19 in pregnant women under consideration for publication," she said.

Incredibly proud to have been awarded a CEIRR Training Fellowship, she said it will allow her to conduct cutting-edge research that focuses on antigen-specific immunity in pregnant women, as well as establish relationships with international collaborators.

"I applied for this grant to help broaden my research experience," she said.

"While we could do the proposed experiments in our Parkville research precinct, our collaborators at St Jude have invaluable experience with this technique that I hope to learn and help establish back in Melbourne.

"I was very excited and relieved when I heard my application was successful – it solidified our plans for important experiments to be done for my PhD and meant that I would be able to have the unique experience of travelling internationally to conduct research with our collaborators."