Research Focus
Emily Speranza, PhD, utilizes systems immunology approaches to better understand host responses to emerging infectious diseases, particularly viruses that cause hemorrhagic disease. She is especially interested in how the earliest events of the immune response are coordinated within primary tissue sites and how the host response can be modified to better control viral replication and spread. In addition to these research questions, she is interested in adapting new technologies, especially single-cell spatial and cellular profiling approaches, for use in high- and maximum-containment BSL-3 and BSL-4 settings. As a computational scientist, she is also interested in developing new approaches for multi-omics data integration to capture additional components of the immune response and better understand how viruses disrupt protective cellular communication networks.