Zina Maria Uckeley completed her Master’s degree working at the Institute for HIV Research. She began developing a novel method of engineering different herpes viruses to be potential vaccine vectors using the new CRISPR-Cas9 technology. Zina was able to show that CRISPR-Cas9 was able to be introduced into various cell types and introduce indels into the viruses.
She completed her undergraduate studies with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Biology at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University and obtained a Bachelor of Applied Science in Life Science at HAN University in the Netherlands in 2015. During her Bachelor’s thesis, she focused on characterizing the cytotoxic effect of EPEC secreted protein B on isolated human monocytes, monocyte-derived macrophages, and monocyte-derived dendritic cells. Since October 2015, Zina has been studying Medical Biology at the University of Duisburg-Essen.