ASP Primate Welfare Award Winner (2022): Blood Microbiome Composition in Humans & Captive Non-human Primates

For the first quarter of 2024, ASP’s Hot Topics in Primate Welfare is featuring the research of Negin Valizadegan, who won the ASP Primate Welfare Award in 2022 for her project titled: “Blood microbiome compositions in humans and captive non-human primates and their variations in sensitivity to bacterial molecules.” Dr. Valizadegan has a PhD in Biological Anthropology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and currently works as a bioinformatics analyst at the High-Performance Computing in Biology Center (HPCBio) at the Roy J Carver Biotechnology Center at the same institute. She has been involved in the H3Africa project where she developed a pipeline for assembly of African Pangenome and currently is involved in data analysis of multiple microbiome and RNASeq projects. Her award-winning work focuses on the identification of bacterial communities in the blood of human and non-human primates to investigate some of the reasons behind variations in susceptibility to infectious diseases across the primate clades. Click here to view a narrated video presentation of her project.