Infectious Diseases Fellow
UC San Francisco
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose
Christina Homer, MD, PhD is a physician scientist and an Infectious Diseases fellow at UC San Francisco. She completed the UCSF MSTP, where she discovered quorum sensing in the fungal pathogen Cryptococcus neoformans under the mentorship of Dr. Hiten Madhani. After Internal Medicine Residency at UCSF, she continued in the Infectious Diseases Fellowship, with additional training in Immunocompromised and Transplant Infectious Diseases, which includes a number of patients with fungal infections. She is now performing her postdoctoral studies with Dr. Anita Sil, studying the human fungal pathogen Coccidioides. She is passionate about developing better treatments, and ultimately a cure, for this difficult-to-treat and poorly understood fungal pathogen. She has discovered a family of Coccidioides proteases that are required to make its unique host morphology, the spherule. She aims to unlock the role of these proteases during infection and in the poorly-understood process of spherule formation. Ultimately, she hopes to develop a protease inhibitor to treat coccidioidomycosis. Dr. Homer recently received an HHMI Hanna Gray Fellowship and, in the future, plans to start her own lab studying Coccidioides pathogenesis and its interactions with the host immune system.