Graduate Students

Sommer Holmes

Sommer is a North Carolina native and graduate of Davidson College, where she earned a B.S. in Biology in 2021. Following graduation, Sommer joined the Duke Human Vaccine Institute, contributing to nearly four years of work investigating B cell responses to HIV with a focus on characterizing the neonatal immune response for the broader goal […]
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Annamarie Thompson

Annamarie is a student in the Molecular Cancer Biology PhD program. She graduated from Mississippi State University in 2025 with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a minor in Mathematics. During her undergraduate studies, Annamarie was involved in a variety of research projects ranging from diabetic wound healing to epigenetic mechanisms of drug resistance in […]
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Julia Louw

Julia is a PhD student in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (CBB) program at Duke. She holds a B.S. in Applied Mathematics from UNC Chapel Hill and an M.S. in Computational Biology from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. Her research interests lie in translational computational approaches to advance precision oncology and uncover mechanisms […]
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Andrew Kurlich

Andrew is a PhD student from Duke’s Developmental and Stem Cell Biology program. In 2022, he graduated from Denison University with a B.S. in Biology and a minor in Computer Science. His research focuses on engineering tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes to improve their therapeutic potential for the treatment of glioblastoma. In his free time, Andrew enjoys swimming, […]
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Megan Benz

Megan is currently a first-year graduate student and a teaching assistant for Drugs and the Brain, an undergraduate course taught by Dr. Cynthia Kuhn. She completed her undergraduate studies at Tulane University, graduating in 2022 with a B.S. in Neuroscience. She remained in New Orleans for two years afterward, working as a lab technician in […]
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Jodie Jepson

Jodie is a PhD student in the Computational Biology and Bioinformatics Program at Duke University School of Medicine. Her research broadly focuses on applying computational modeling and spatial omics approaches to study cellular behavior and interactions within complex biological systems. Outside of the lab, she enjoys playing tennis and hiking.
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Emma Pristo

Emma graduated from Northwestern University in 2024, where she studied neuroscience and political science with aspirations to attend medical school. At Northwestern, she was involved in basic-science research in cancer immunology and clinical research in pediatric epilepsy, through which she discovered a potential career interest in pediatric oncology. She is now an incoming MS1 at Duke […]
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