People

The Saeijentists

The Toxoplasma researchers of the Saeij lab at UC Davis: postdocs, graduate students and undergraduates from many countries, and a growing family of alumni in academia, industry and medicine.

Saeijentist, spelled out in fluorescence micrographs of Toxoplasma-infected cells
Portrait of Jeroen Saeij.

Jeroen Saeij

Principal Investigator · Professor, Department of Pathology, Microbiology & Immunology

Jeroen trained at Wageningen University with Geert Wiegertjes and at Stanford with John Boothroyd, started his laboratory at MIT in 2007, was named a Pew Scholar in the Biomedical Sciences in 2010, and moved the lab to UC Davis in 2015.

Full profile, research and teaching →

Current members

  • Qinli Liang
    Postdoctoral fellow
  • Carol de Moraes de Siqueira
    Postdoctoral fellow
  • Somrita Basu
    Postdoctoral fellow
  • Rodrigue Houngue
    Postdoctoral fellow
  • Stephanie Martinez-Beltran
    Graduate student, Microbiology Graduate Group
  • Raymond Zurich
    Graduate student

Alumni · Postdoctoral fellows

  • Kirk Jensen · Associate Professor of Molecular & Cell Biology, UC Merced
  • Mariane Melo · Senior Laboratory Director, Scripps Research
  • Ana Camejo · Senior Medical Director, Global Medical Affairs, Intellia Therapeutics
  • Daniel Gold · Associate Professor of Biological Sciences, St. Edward’s University
  • Musa Hassan · Associate Professor and Group Leader, The Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh
  • Cynthia Cordeiro · Ophthalmologist and Professor of Ophthalmology, Faculdade de Medicina de Campos; Administrative Director, Unimed Campos, Brazil
  • Eleni Konstantinou · Assistant Professor of Ophthalmology (retina and ocular oncology), Weill Cornell Medicine
  • Shruthi Krishnamurthy · Associate Director, Business Development and Licensing, Mass General Brigham Innovation
  • Tatiana Paredes-Santos · Senior Scientist, Agilent Technologies (2019–2026)
  • Lamba Omar Sangaré · Assistant Professor of Biology, Texas A&M University
  • Debanjan Mukhopadhyay · Assistant Professor, Institute of Health Sciences, Presidency University, Kolkata
  • David Arranz-Solís · César Nombela Fellow, SALUVET group, Complutense University of Madrid
  • Yifan Wang · Assistant Professor of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Michigan Medical School
  • Parag Maru · Antibody discovery and biologics development, mAbTree Biologics
  • Mebratu Bitew · Staff Scientist, University of Rochester Medical Center
  • Rosalba Cruz Miron · Postdoctoral fellow with Markus Meissner, University of Munich (LMU)

Alumni · Graduate students

  • Emily Rosowski · PhD MIT; postdoc with Anna Huttenlocher, UW–Madison; Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences, Clemson University
  • Diana Lu · PhD MIT; Managing Partner, Cross River Strategies
  • Kimberly Cirelli · PhD MIT; postdoc with Shane Crotty, La Jolla Institute; Associate Director, Oncology Discovery, TScan Therapeutics
  • Wendy Niedelman · PhD MIT; Associate Director of Scientific Communications, Vaniam Group
  • Ninghan Yang · PhD MIT; Merck KGaA, Singapore
  • Renee McKell · MS MIT; research operations, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
  • Benjamin Waldman · Moved to the Lourido lab (Whitehead Institute) when the lab relocated; Scientist, Genentech
  • Samuel Minot · Moved to the University of Pennsylvania; Associate Director, Data Core, Fred Hutch Cancer Center
  • Pavel Morales · Integrative Pathobiology Graduate Group; now a postdoctoral fellow with Rodolfo Urbano, UC Davis
  • Felipe Rodriguez · Immunology Graduate Group; now a postdoctoral fellow at the USDA Agricultural Research Service

Alumni · Staff

  • Lindsay Julien · Research technician, MIT

Alumni · Undergraduate students

Lauren Rodda (MIT, Amgen Scholar), Stephanie Lin (MIT), Quynh Nguyen (MIT), Oscar Sosa (MIT), Kenneth Hu (MIT, Amgen Scholar), Carolina de la Puente (Amgen Scholar), Kiva McFetridge (Amgen Scholar), Dordaneh Sugano (MIT), Natalle Yu (MIT), Ana Huertas (UC Davis), Maria Navarro Nunez (UC Davis), Carolina Gomez (UC Davis), Alyssa Amezquita (UC Davis), Monique Richards (MIT Summer Research Program), Deepshikha Dogra (MIT Summer Research Program), Yaning Zhang (MIT)

Alumni · Visiting students

Yiding Wang, Markeiya Polite, Rogier Gaiser, Lara Cornel, Erwan Boedec, Joris Sprokholt, Patricio Barros, Brittany Castagna, Rizwan Muhammad Hafiz, Wing Yan Leung, Laura van Eyndhoven, Tjitse van der Molen, Aylan Farid-Arenas