Please join us for an open house at
WPI's Biomanufacturing Education and Training Center
50 Prescott St., Worcester, MA
Wednesday, June 5, 2019
4 pm - 6 pm
Event Schedule
| 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm | Arrival/Tours of the BETC Begin |
| 5:00 pm - 5:45 pm | Presentation on Infectious Diseases by Reeta Rao, PhD, Professor, Biology & Biotechnology, WPI |
| 5:45 pm – 6:00 pm | Presentation on WPI Educational Opportunities and Workforce Training for Biotechnology |
About the Presentation
The next big human pandemic…
…is likely to be a zoonotic virus – one that has acquired the ability to “spillover”, from an animal to humans. Some memorable examples include 1918 influenza, AIDs, H1N1, West Nile virus etc. This talk will outline the recent Ebola outbreak, its global and economic impacts, and connect the dots to other emerging microbial threats.
About Reeta Rao, PhD
Dr. Rao is a leader in yeast genetics and has focused her research activity in using yeast as a platform organism for various biological applications. For example, to understand and manage fungal diseases, she uses a variety of biochemical, molecular, genetic, genomic, and behavioral readouts to explore fungal virulence strategies and in identifying novel therapeutics in a high throughput fashion. Dr. Rao has ongoing research appointment at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, to study the genomics of fungal infectious disease. More recently,she has initiated projects with the University of Massachusetts focusing on a fungal species associated with the microbiome, by analyzing genomes of fungi isolated from human patients to identify genetic and genomic changes that alter virulence and/or drug resistance. She was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology.